The first thing I'd like to call your attention to is the saturation of tone languages in Africa. This map is taken from a remarkable website, The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS), consisting of 141 maps of distinctive linguistic features, and as far as I've been able to determine, it's very unusual for any one region to be dominated by a single trait. The chances of this being a coincidence have to be pretty close to nil. If modern humans originated in Africa, then the earliest languages, including the language spoken by the Out of Africa migrants (HMP), were almost certainly tonal.
The next thing I'd like to call your attention to is the comparable saturation of tone languages in Southeast Asia and also Melanesia -- here too coincidence seems highly unlikely. Since these are areas populated by many indigenous groups, hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists, the saturation of tonal languages is most likely part of a broader pattern of cultural inheritance from HMC, as evidenced by other important features I'll be discussing presently.
If this is the case, then what are we to make of the areas along the same pathway where tone is almost completely absent? The dearth of tone languages in Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea and much of Island Melanesia can easily be explained by the relatively recent expansion of Austronesian speaking agriculturalists throughout this region beginning around 8,000 years ago. But India, Pakistan and Australia are not part of this development, and their non-tonal languages are much, much older. Since the very long South Asian coastline represents an important segment of the Out of Africa path, one would expect to find tonal languages here as well. And since both the archaeological and genetic evidence indicates that Australia was a very early, if remote, offshoot from the Out of Africa migration, the total absence of tonal languages on that continent is also extremely puzzling.
A pattern begins to emerge, however, as we realize that essentially the same odd distribution applies to certain other important characteristics, morphological, genetic and cultural, that, taken alone, are equally puzzling. For example, as I've already noted, those peoples in Asia and Oceania closest morphologically to African pygmies (thus likely to resemble HMP -- see Post 254), usually referred to as negritos, are not found at all in South Asia (aside from the Andaman Islands, well to the south and east), but are relatively common in Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Melanesia.
While Africa is famous for its remarkably rich traditions of wood carving and mask design, comparably elaborate artistic traditions are not found until we go beyond South Asia to indigenous peoples in parts of Malaysia, Indonesia and Melanesia, where some of the resemblances to African carvings, both artistic and contextual, are truly striking. If these were were traditions maintained by HMC, as seems very likely, why aren't they found in equal abundance everywhere along the Out of Africa trail?
The same question could be applied to the musical traditions of HMC, dominated as they must have been by P/B style. The "African signature" I've written so much about is essentially absent from the musical practices of both South Asia and Australia. This mystery is discussed at some length in my essay, Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors and also on this blog, beginning with Post 12. As I wrote in "Echoes,"
If the original Out-of-Africa group moved uniformly all the way from Africa down the coast of south Asia to the Malay Peninsula and from there down through Indonesia to New Guinea and Australia, as is sometimes claimed, then we musicologists have a problem. While many indigenous groups along the “beachcomber” route sing and play in a manner strongly reminiscent of P/B style, there has to my knowledge never been any instance of such a style found anywhere in Australia (p. 30).
Essentially the same absence applies to the entirety of the Near East and South Asia. In none of these regions have I as yet found more than the faintest traces of P/B, either vocal or instrumental -- no hocket, no interlock, no hocketing pipe, flute, trumpet or panpipe ensembles, no stamping tubes, no hocketing gong or percussion ensembles, maybe the occasional slit drum. Yet once we move into the same region where tone languages, negrito hunter-gatherers, and African-style carvings and masks are found, all the above musical practices, and the instruments associated with them, are also found -- in abundance. So what gives?
The same gap appears in the genetic evidence, interestingly enough. Stephen Oppenheimer has written as follows, regarding
the paradox of the Indian genetic picture, in which the genetic trail of the beachcombers can be detected, but the bulk of Indian subgroups...are unique to the subcontinent, especially among the tribes of the south-east. This is what we would expect for a recovery from a great disaster (The Real Eve, p. 193).Oppenheimer had a very specific disaster in mind, by the way,
“the greatest natural calamity to befall any humans, ever,” the eruption, c. 70,000-74,000 years ago, of Mount Toba, in Sumatra. The explosion was so vast it left a plume of ash over the entirety of India for approximately five years, what Oppenheimer has called a “nuclear winter,” in which almost every living thing in that area would have been wiped out (The Real Eve, p. 82). This is one of the very few events in prehistory that can be precisely dated and measured, since “a metres-thick ash layer is found throughout the region.” ("Echoes," p. 31).
Though the evidence that modern humans were in Asia at the time Toba erupted is both slim and controversial, there is in fact very good reason to believe that some sort of calamity befel HMP's descendants during their great migration eastward. I discussed this possibility at some length in Post 12, where I presented the following map, illustrating how the early history of the Out of Africa migrants, and their music, could have been affected by a disaster of this sort -- in this case, a Tsunami.
In the first little map, titled "Out of Africa," all the arrows are red, representing the five variants of the original "Pygmy/Bushmen" style (A1 - 5 on the Phylogenetic Tree) that, as I see it, must have spread along with the original "out of Africa" migrants, following Oppenheimer's coastal route, all the way to Sundaland and beyond, turning the corner around the Moluccas, I guess and then continuing north along the SE Asiatic coast.
Mini-map 2, "Bottleneck Event," is an attempt to picture a catastrophic event that could account for the musical gap we find between Yemen and Myanmar, where little or no evidence of Pygmy/Bushmen style can be found today. According to Oppenheimer, there is a very similar gap in the genetic evidence, though, as I understand, not everyone agrees about this. As I see it, only some sort of catastrophe at some point from, say, 75,000 to 50,000 years ago, can explain all the very different musical styles we find in the world today, especially the styles
represented in the phylogenetic tree as B2 and B3 and their derivatives. So this map, unlike any other I've ever seen, is not based solely on continuity, but contains an abrupt break, representing the effects of the bottleneck on the various surviving groups.
I'll include one more map before quitting for the day: It's from a recently published article titled Correcting for Purifying Selection: An Improved Human Mitochondrial Molecular Clock. See what you can make of it.
(to be continued . . . )