Worldwide patterns of genetic variation are driven by human demographic history. Here, we test whether this demographic history has left similar signatures on phonemes-sound units that distinguish meaning between words in languages-to those it has left on genes. We analyze, jointly and in parallel, phoneme inventories from 2,082 worldwide languages and microsatellite polymorphisms from 246 worldwide populations. On a global scale, both genetic distance and phonemic distance between populations are significantly correlated with geographic distance. Geographically close language pairs share significantly more phonemes than distant language pairs, whether or not the languages are closely related. The regional geographic axes of greatest phonemic differentiation correspond to axes of genetic differentiation, suggesting that there is a relationship between human dispersal and linguistic variation. However, the geographic distribution of phoneme inventory sizes does not follow the predictions of a serial founder effect during human expansion out of Africa. Furthermore, although geographically isolated populations lose genetic diversity via genetic drift, phonemes are not subject to drift in the same way: within a given geographic radius, languages that are relatively isolated exhibit more variance in number of phonemes than languages with many neighbors. This finding suggests that relatively isolated languages are more susceptible to phonemic change than languages with many neighbors. Within a language family, phoneme evolution along genetic, geographic, or cognate-based linguistic trees predicts similar ancestral phoneme states to those predicted from ancient sources. More genetic sampling could further elucidate the relative roles of vertical and horizontal transmission in phoneme evolution. cultural evolution | human migration | languages | population genetics

We analyzed 40 single nucleotide polymorphism and 19 short tandem repeat Y-chromosomal markers in a large sample of 1,525 indigenous individuals from 14 populations in the Caucasus and 254 additional individuals representing potential source populations. We also employed a lexicostatistical approach to reconstruct the history of the languages of the North Caucasian family spoken by the Caucasus populations. We found a different major haplogroup to be prevalent in each of four sets of populations that occupy distinct geographic regions and belong to different linguistic branches. The haplogroup frequencies correlated with geography and, even more strongly, with language. Within haplogroups, a number of haplotype clusters were shown to be specific to individual populations and languages. The data suggested a direct origin of Caucasus male lineages from the Near East, followed by high levels of isolation, differentiation, and genetic drift in situ. Comparison of genetic and linguistic reconstructions covering the last few millennia showed striking correspondences between the topology and dates of the respective gene and language trees and with documented historical events. Overall, in the Caucasus region, unmatched levels of gene-language coevolution occurred within geographically isolated populations, probably due to its mountainous terrain.

Recent work in comparative linguistics suggests that all, or almost all, attested human languages may derive from a single earlier language. If that is so, then this language-like nearly all extant languages-most likely had a basic ordering of the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) in a declarative sentence of the type "the man (S) killed (V) the bear (O)." When one compares the distribution of the existing structural types with the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages, four conclusions may be drawn. (i) The word order in the ancestral language was SOV.(ii) Except for cases of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change, when it occurs, has been for the most part SOV > SVO and, beyond that, SVO > VSO/VOS with a subsequent reversion to SVO occurring occasionally. Reversion to SOV occurs only through diffusion. (iii) Diffusion, although important, is not the dominant process in the evolution of word order. (iv) The two extremely rare word orders (OVS and OSV) derive directly from SOV. R ecent work in genetics (1), archeology (2), and linguistics (3) indicates that all behaviorally modern humans share a recent common origin. The date involved is often identified with the sudden appearance, roughly 50,000 y ago, of strikingly modern behavior in the form of more sophisticated tools as well as painting, sculpture, and engraving. This new Upper Paleolithic culture differed dramatically from the Mousterian culture of the anatomically modern humans from whom the behaviorally modern humans emerged. The cause of this abrupt change has been attributed to the appearance of fully modern human language (2, 4), and this is a plausible conjecture. With regard to language, Bengtson and Ruhlen (3) have presented evidence that suggests that all or almost all attested human languages share a common origin. That origin need not necessarily refer all of the way back to the time when behaviorally modern humans emerged and peopled the Old World. There could have been a "bottleneck" effect at a much later time, with a single language spoken then being ancestral to all or most attested languages (5). If that is so, then that ancestral language, like nearly all modern languages, must have had a dominant ordering of the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) in simple declarative sentences such as "the man (S) killed (V) the bear (O)." One should note that there is great variation in the rigidity of the basic word order in different languages, in part due to the fact that the syntactic functions of subject and object are often marked on the noun, as in Russian, which permits all six possible orders to yield grammatical sentences. Nonetheless, the basic word order of Russian is clearly SVO, and the other orders reflect special emphasis or other pragmatic factors. Australian languages, in particular, are known for their extremely free word order, and it has been claimed that some of those languages have no basic order. Still, as we shall see, the basic word order reported for most Australian languages is normally SOV, although oth...

African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the History of Click Languages In the article by Knight et al. on pages 464-473 of the March 18 issue, Haplogroup E3b was omitted from the column headings in Table 1. As a result, E,D and C,F were shifted one column to the left. A corrected Table 1 is available at http://www.stanford.edu/‫ف‬aknight/ Click/. The article has also been corrected on the Current Biology web site. Additionally, the Biaka haplotype at the extreme left of the M112 median-joining network in Figure 3 should represent two individuals rather than one.

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