Prehistoric Queensland contacts?

[steve_bank]

I remember seeing an account of Thor Heyerdahl's expedition from my childhood. A very interesting experiment. TH and his fellow adventurers made a raft from balsa-tree logs, the Kon-Tiki, and sailed it from the west coast of South America to the Polynesian islands.

But it's very evident from genetic and linguistic evidence that Polynesians came from the west, the islands off of Southeast Asia, not the east, the west coast of South America.

As to the word *kumala ~ *kumara for sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), it traveled with the vegetable, making it a wander word.

Entries for KUMALA.1 [PN] Sweet Potato (Ipomoea): *ku(u)mala in Polynesian Lexicon Project Online - "It is possible that all forms outside of EP are borrowings as there are no early references to the plant in western Polynesia."

Maori kūmara - Wiktionary, the free dictionary - Tongan kumala - Wiktionary, the free dictionary - Hawaiian ʻuala - Wiktionary, the free dictionary - Quechua kumar - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

The Hawaiian form has a sound shift relative to most other Polynesian forms: /k/ -> /'/ (glottal stop):
Maori kūmara ~ Hawaiian ʻuala (sweet potato)
Maori koe ~ Hawaiian 'oe (you singular)
Maori koutou ~ Hawaiian ʻoukou (you plural)

Appendix:Oceanic Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Appendix:Austronesian Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

So eastern Polynesians got the sweet potato before they colonized Hawaii with the colonists changing /k/ into /'/.

This suggests a scenario of some Polynesians making it all the way to South America, but finding a lot of people there, and not founding a colony there because of all those people. But from these people, they acquired sweet potatoes and a word for them, and they then returned westward with these vegetables to their fellow Polynesians.

I watched a show on a genetic study mapping the paths out of Africa. There were a few unexpected surprises, but the paths are mapped. That trumps speculation.

There was speculation on how humans crossed the Shara to get north. Relatively recently a cave was found in the Sahara with cave drawings depicting the Sahara as being green with wildlife,

Humans spread by walking or sailing. We still do. People row solo across the Atlantic. Captain Bligh's famous feat of navigation in a small boat across open ocean to reach an island after being set adrift by the Bounty mutineers.

That the Atalmtic and Pacific were crossed to the Americas to me is likeley.

An ancient human was found high in the Alps frozen. His clothes were layered leathers stuffed with vegetation for insulation and he had a kit to male weapons. What was he doing way up there? Dated around 3230 BC. The reconstruction of his clothes is interesting.

Ötzi - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[lpetrich]

Remember how I said upthread that "hyperdiffusionism was one of the greatest misconceptions of modern anthropology?" Thor Heyerdahl is a prime offender, and much of his work was dedicated to bolstering the case for hyperdiffusionism, a 19th century concept that had already dropped out of favour among the anthropological and archaeological community of his time, and for good reason.

A good test of diffusionism is from linguistics. With diffusion of ideas and technologies and domestic organisms and the like often comes diffusion of words for these things, to the point that some linguists call far-spreading words Wanderwörter (sg. Wanderwort) -- "wander words".

WALS Online - Feature 138A: Tea - that drink was invented in China, but what people call it depends on where their word diffused from: northern China - cha - or southern China - te.

To consider how well diffusionism holds up, I will consider some semantically well-defined words: words for numbers, more specifically positive integers.

Words for them sometimes get borrowed from people who do a lot of counting. Thus, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese have Chinese words alongside their native ones, and Thai has only Chinese words. But that's part of being culturally overshadowed by China for a long time, with their speakers borrowing numerous Chinese words.

Closer to home, many present-day European languages have oodles of number-related words and prefixes borrowed from Latin and Greek.

But there are several different inventions of high-count words like "hundred" and "thousand":

• Proto-Indo-European: 10 *dekm, 100 *kmtom, 1000 *gheslom
• Proto-Turkic 10 *ôn, 100 *yûr', 1000 *bïng, 10,000 *tümen
• Proto-Dravidian 10 *paHtu, 100 *nûtu
• Proto-Semitic: 10 *\asar-, 100 *mi/at-, 1000 */alp-
• Egyptian 10 *mûc'aw, 100 *shit, 1000 *khar, 10,000 *ca'b'a\, 100,000 hefen, 1,000,000 hhahh
• Proto-Sino-Tibetan 10 *gip ~ *tsi ~ *tsjaj, 100 *brgja, 1000 *stawng
• Proto-Austronesian 10 *puluq, 100 *ghatus
  • Proto-Malayo-Polynesian 10 *puluq, 100 *rhatus, 1000 *rhibu

There are also high counters who have used bases other than 10, like Central Americans with base 20 and Sumerians with base 60.

 

[lpetrich]

He didn't believe the Polynesians to be capable of sailing upwind, so in his mind, they *must* have come from the East, and with the Kon Tiki expedition, he'd broken the last straw his detractors were clinging on to. He even went on to say that the people who originally settled SE Polynesia were white descendants of the Middle Easterners who had colonised the American tropics, partly based on a cherry picked reading of local legends that may well have been a distorted memory of European contact a few centuries earlier.

Did he ever try to explain linguistic differences?

If you want to do some amateur comparisons, try some lists of highly-stable meanings.

•  Swadesh list - 100-word list with several variations
• Appendix:Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, the free dictionary - a big collection of words from a 207-word list
•  Dolgopolsky list - 15-word list
•  Leipzig–Jakarta list - 100-word list with some variations

Let's look at "eye". Tagalog (Philippines), Malagasy (Madagascar), Fijian, Maori, and Tahitian all have mata, and Hawaiian has maka, a result of a regular sound change: t -> k. But Quechua has ñawi, Nahuatl ixtli, Proto-Semitic *\ayn-, Old-Kingdom Egyptian *jîrat, and Proto-Indo-European *okw- (> English eye, German Auge, Latin oculus, Polish oko, ...)

This is only one example, but it's easy to do what I did with the references that I consulted.

 

[steve_bank]

I wreathed a video series from UCLA on history of western civilization.

They cycle has been rise of convictions, conquest, and assimilation. The conquering power inevitably assimilates aspects of the conquered. Knowledge and literacy grows in the process. Cross politicization is the term.


Today American pop culture has spread worldwide. Korean, Russian, and Japanese cultures have adapted American rap music to their own cultures.

Here in the USA Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican-Latino metaphosphors are part of the culture.

 

[Jokodo]

He didn't believe the Polynesians to be capable of sailing upwind, so in his mind, they *must* have come from the East, and with the Kon Tiki expedition, he'd broken the last straw his detractors were clinging on to. He even went on to say that the people who originally settled SE Polynesia were white descendants of the Middle Easterners who had colonised the American tropics, partly based on a cherry picked reading of local legends that may well have been a distorted memory of European contact a few centuries earlier.

Did he ever try to explain linguistic differences?

I don't think he did. It's part of why I said it was pseudoscience even then. I don't have esoteric knowledge of the research history of MP languages, but I find it hard to believe it wasn't already a well established fact among historical and comparative linguists.

 

[Jokodo]

An ancient human was found high in the Alps frozen. His clothes were layered leathers stuffed with vegetation for insulation and he had a kit to male weapons. What was he doing way up there? Dated around 3230 BC. The reconstruction of his clothes is interesting.

Ötzi - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm Austrian. My dad was born 40km (straight line distance, there's mountains in the way, of course) from where Ötzi was found. However I'm not quite seeing his relevance to prehistoric ocean crossings.

 

[lpetrich]

Oops, Malagasy has maso instead of mata for eye.

He didn't believe the Polynesians to be capable of sailing upwind, so in his mind, they *must* have come from the East, and with the Kon Tiki expedition, he'd broken the last straw his detractors were clinging on to. He even went on to say that the people who originally settled SE Polynesia were white descendants of the Middle Easterners who had colonised the American tropics, partly based on a cherry picked reading of local legends that may well have been a distorted memory of European contact a few centuries earlier.

Did he ever try to explain linguistic differences?

I don't think he did. It's part of why I said it was pseudoscience even then. I don't have esoteric knowledge of the research history of MP languages, but I find it hard to believe it wasn't already a well established fact among historical and comparative linguists.

The Austronesian family and its Malayo-Polynesian subfamily have been recognized for well over a century. I'll do the Dolgopolsky list. First, to illustrate the concept: English, German, Latin, and Russian:

• I/me - ich/mich - egô/me - ja/menja
• two/pair - zwei - duo - dva
• you (sg. inf.: thou/thee) - du/dich - tû/te - ty/tebja
• who/what - wer/was - quis/quid - kto/chto
• tongue - Zunge - lingua - jazyk
• name - Name - nômen(-min-) - imja(-men-)
• eye - Auge - oculus - glaz (oko)
• heart - Herz - côr(d-) - serdtse
• tooth - Zahn - dêns(-nt-) - zub
• no/not - nicht - nôn - ne
• (finger)nail - Fingernagel - unguis - nogot'
• louse/nit - Laus - pêdis - vosh'
• tear/teardrop (not in 207-word list)
• water - Wasser - aqua - voda
• dead (to die) - sterben - mori - umirat'

j = English y in the Russian one. I thought of including some others, but I hope that it's at least a little bit evident what that list shows.

 

[lpetrich]

Here is Quechua, Maori, Hawaiian - Indonesian, Malagasy, Tagalog

• I/me - ñuqa - ahau, au - au - - aku - aho - ako
• two/pair - iskay - rua - lua - - dua - roa - dalawa
• you (sg. inf.) - qam - koe - 'oe - - kamu - ianao - ikaw
• who/what - pi/ima - wai/aha - wai/aha - - siapa/apa - iza/inona - sino/ano
• tongue - qallu - arero - alelo - - lidah - lela - dila
• name - suti - ingoa - inoa - - nama - anarana - ngalan
• eye - ñawi - mata - maka - - mata - maso - mata
• heart - sunqu - manawa - puʻuwai - - jantung - fo - puso
• tooth - kiru - niho - niho - - gigi - nify - ngipin
• no/not - mana/ama...chu - kāore, kīhai - ʻaʻole - - bukan, tidak - tsy - hindi
• (finger)nail - sillu - maikuku - mikiʻao - - kuku - hoho - kuko
• louse/nit - usa - kutu - ʻuku - - kutu - hao - kuto
• tear/teardrop (not in 207-word list)
• water - unu, yaku - wai - wai - - air - rano - tubig
• dead (to die) - wañuy - mate - make - - mati - maty - mamatay

Easy to see that Maori and Hawaiian are close, and are related by sound correspondences:
Maori ~ Hawaiian
r ~ l
k ~ '
t ~ k
Indonesian, Malagasy, Tagalog are more distant, but still recognizably related. Quechua doesn't look very related at all.

 

[lpetrich]

I think that a problem in Thor Heyerdahl's day was getting good dates for archeological sites. Radiocarbon dating was developed in the late 1940's, and became widely used in the 1950's. That likely settled a lot of long-running controversies about dating of many sites.

Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement | Science with a link to a PDF in Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and... - Google Scholar

A little over 5,000 years ago, some Proto-Austronesian-speaking South Chinese farmers crossed the Strait of Taiwan and settled that island. We know this because the pre-Chinese people there speak the most divergent Austronesian languages.

Some 4,000 years ago, some Proto-Malayo-Polynesian speakers left eastern Taiwan, going southward and settling in Luzon, the northernmost Philippine island. Their descendents then spread southward and eastward, reaching Samoa and Tonga a little over 3,000 years ago.

Some 1,500 years ago, some Proto-Malagasy speakers left the Barito River in southern Borneo, ending up in Madagascar.

Some 1,200 years go, some Proto-Eastern-Polynesian speakers left Samoa and Tonga for Tahiti and nearby islands, and over the next few hundred years, they traveled north to Hawaii, east to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and likely to South America, and southwest to New Zealand.

 

[lpetrich]

Austronesian, like Indo-European, dates back to the mid-Holocene. It's hard to look much further with historical linguistics, but statistical techniques offer at least a chance at doing so, especially with Swadesh and Swadesh-like lists like the Dolgopolsky one.

Austro-Tai Revisited by Weera Ostapirat: finds statistically significant evidence of common ancestry of the Austronesian languages and the Kra-Dai ones. Kra-Dai includes Thai and several others in Southeast Asia and Southern China.

Going further is Austric, also including Austroasiatic (several SE Asian and Eastern Indian ones, including Vietnamese and Khmer) and Hmong-Mien / Miao-Yao of SE Asia and S China. But that is still very speculative.

So it's Southeast Asia -> Taiwan -> Philippines to W Polynesia -> E Polynesia

 

[Jokodo]

So eastern Polynesians got the sweet potato before they colonized Hawaii with the colonists changing /k/ into /'/.

I don't think that's a very strong argument though. The sound change /k/ -> /'/ could be much more recent than the initial colonisation. For all I know, it could be a synchronous phonotactic rule that disallows [k] before certain consonants, and Hawaiian keeps replacing [k] with ['] in contemporary English loans. For an example closer to home, consider High German /s/->[ʃ] (as in English "sh") before consonants, a shift that happened way back in the middle ages. And yet at least some speakers apply it to modern loans from English, such as "[ʃ]prinkler" for lawn sprinkler and "[ʃ]pikes" for spiked tyres. This is possibly aided by spelling conventions: while [ʃ] before other consonants is written as "sch" ("schwimmen"-swim, "schmelzen"-smelt), [ʃ] before "t" and "p" is by convention spelt as a plain "s". That may be why we don't have "[ʃ]martphone" as an accepted pronunciation. But I'm pretty sure it's a common slip of the tongue and/or ironically used by speakers who haven't thought a second of their lives about sound shifts, and without the conservative force of spelling, it might exactly be what we'd find.