panopticon
24th September 2011, 05:36
G'day All,
Came across an interesting article that I thought I'd share with the class:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/09/23/3323640.htm
States:
Sequencing of a West Australian Aboriginal man's hair shows he was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia that took place about 70,000 years ago.
The finding, published today in Science, rewrites the history of the human species by confirming humans moved out of Africa in waves of migrations rather than one single out-of-Africa diaspora.
This is in alignment with a linguistics study I was reading the other day (I'll see if I can find it if anyone's interested) that showed how indigenous language use varies in relation to length of time in locale. It made mention that Australian Aborigines refer to the place by name and not description as is the more common use.
This is very complicated but essentially the basics that I understood were that the Australian Aborigines describe everything in their tribal area by name whereas tribes in North America (can't remember which one the study referred to) used description more. So the Australian Aboriginals might call a place "Bob" whereas the North American Tribe might call it "big rock on steep hill past running water" (remember this is if they lived in the same place for the length of the tribes existence and that I'm being a bit funny aswell). I've simplified it a lot as I didn't understand it all but found it really interesting.
So from my understanding the two studies possibly reinforce each other to some extent.
Just thought I'd share.
Kind Regards, :yo:
Panopticon
Addendum:
Here's a paper on the difference between the traditional Aboriginal people (Yindjibarndi) and the English usage (not the same but a good intro):
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88.6266&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Came across an interesting article that I thought I'd share with the class:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/09/23/3323640.htm
States:
Sequencing of a West Australian Aboriginal man's hair shows he was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia that took place about 70,000 years ago.
The finding, published today in Science, rewrites the history of the human species by confirming humans moved out of Africa in waves of migrations rather than one single out-of-Africa diaspora.
This is in alignment with a linguistics study I was reading the other day (I'll see if I can find it if anyone's interested) that showed how indigenous language use varies in relation to length of time in locale. It made mention that Australian Aborigines refer to the place by name and not description as is the more common use.
This is very complicated but essentially the basics that I understood were that the Australian Aborigines describe everything in their tribal area by name whereas tribes in North America (can't remember which one the study referred to) used description more. So the Australian Aboriginals might call a place "Bob" whereas the North American Tribe might call it "big rock on steep hill past running water" (remember this is if they lived in the same place for the length of the tribes existence and that I'm being a bit funny aswell). I've simplified it a lot as I didn't understand it all but found it really interesting.
So from my understanding the two studies possibly reinforce each other to some extent.
Just thought I'd share.
Kind Regards, :yo:
Panopticon
Addendum:
Here's a paper on the difference between the traditional Aboriginal people (Yindjibarndi) and the English usage (not the same but a good intro):
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88.6266&rep=rep1&type=pdf