Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects

Bowern, Claire

doi:10.1515/lity.2011.015

Cited by 13 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…3); we do not conclude that this supports an origin for language in Europe for several reasons. Although a population's genetic diversity reflects the number of its founders, the relationship between the number of founders of a population and its language's phonemes is more complex (18,21,25,27,(43)(44)(45)(46). Furthermore, only a subset of the model's predictions apply to languages (16), and the mutation rate of phonemes may be high enough that signatures of ancient divergence are erased faster in phonemes than in genes (39,57).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To address the relationship between current speaker population size and phoneme inventory size (25,28,(44)(45)(46), we repeated the regression analysis using speaker population size as an additional independent variable, and we found no statistical support in the Ruhlen database for including it in our regression models (P = 0.35). For PHOIBLE, including the base 10 logarithm of speaker population sizes reported by Ethnologue as another independent variable in the regression model produced the same best-fit center as the simple linear regression (67.6684°, 36.2°) and led to a modest but significant increase in the variance Fig.…”

Section: −4mentioning

confidence: 94%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations

Creanza¹,

Ruhlen

Pemberton

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

117

142

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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

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: −4mentioning

confidence: 94%

A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations

Creanza¹,

Ruhlen

Pemberton

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

117

142

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Paleolithic languages would have been spoken by relatively small populations (Bowern 2011) . Sproat (2011) asks if there is any reason to believe that a population of, say, tens of individuals would show less linguistic diversity than their founder population which may have consisted of, at most, hundreds of individuals?…”

Section: There Is No Positive Correlation Between Population Size Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A second point of scrutiny is the fact that colonization in recent centuries, as well as migrations in prehistory, make current population figures irrelevant for the time scale of Atkinson's claims (Bowern 2010;Dahl 2011;Maddieson et al 2011;Sproat 2011) . For example, Liberman (2011) notes that the rate of phonetic innovation and phonemic splits in recorded history makes it implausible that phonological inventory sizes still reflect a serial founder effect in the timescale that Atkinson is investigating.…”

Section: There Is No Positive Correlation Between Population Size Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Languages, evolution and statistics: human sound systems were shaped by changes in bite configuration.Response to Tarasov & Uyeda (2020)

Blasí

Moran

Moisik

et al. 2020

Preprint

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In Blasi et al. (2019) we have shown, through a series of statistical analyses and models, that human sound systems have been affected by a transition in bite configuration starting from the Neolithic. Tarasov and Uyeda (2020) (henceforth T&U) raise a number of observations in relation to our article. We appreciate T&U's engagement with our work and their sharing of the code and data of the analyses reported. In brief, their technical comment involves five analyses: Binomial Causal Models (BCM) 2. Linear Regression of across-area variation in labiodentals and subsistence 3. Predictive Posterior Simulations (PPS) 4. Poisson Linear Regression (PLR): model comparison 5. Phylogenetic AnalysesIn what follows, we show that the discrepancies they report between our findings and theirs are due mostly to ill-specified models, weak (or missing) statistical evidence, and a misinterpretation of our results. After these issues are addressed, we conclude that T&U's claims do not hold.

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“…In a serial founder effect model, a series of successive bottlenecks from a single origin of expansion produces a stepwise increase in genetic drift — and consequent decrease in genetic diversity — as a function of geographic distance from the origin. Although the ability to identify a unique model for human evolutionary history from genome-wide diversity patterns has generated debate across a range of disciplines (for example, [1, 21–32]), the serial founder effect model has proven to be a useful framework for both understanding the dynamic nonequilibrium history of human populations and identifying origins of large-scale human population expansions [6, 19, 33–35]. However, emerging high-quality archaic genomes and genomic datasets sampling increasing numbers of individuals from diverse human populations have shed new light on the complex demographic events that characterize human evolutionary history.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating the signatures of demic expansion and archaic introgression in studies of human population genomics

Sugden

Ramachandran

2016

Current Opinion in Genetics & Development

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Human population genomic studies have repeatedly observed a decrease in heterozygosity and an increase in linkage disequilibrium with geographic distance from Africa. While multiple demographic models can generate these patterns, many studies invoke the serial founder effect model, in which populations expand from a single origin and each new population’s founders represent a subset of genetic variation in the previous population. The model assumes no admixture with archaic hominins, however, recent studies have identified loci in Homo sapiens bearing signatures of archaic introgression. These results appear to contradict the validity of analyses invoking the serial founder effect model, but we show these two perspectives are compatible. We also propose using the serial founder effect model as a null model for determining the signature of archaic admixture in modern human genomes at different geographic and genomic scales.

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Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects

Cited by 13 publications

References 16 publications

A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations

A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations

Languages, evolution and statistics: human sound systems were shaped by changes in bite configuration.Response to Tarasov & Uyeda (2020)

Integrating the signatures of demic expansion and archaic introgression in studies of human population genomics

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