HUMAN DIVERSITY AND LANGUAGE DIVERSITY

Since language is the derIDing trait of our species, human evolution and linguistic evolution are obviously closely intertwined. Recent studies in genetics suggest that anatomically modem humans emerged at a very late date, perhaps 50 kys (Bertrapetit 2000; Thompson 2000). This dating is consistent with the onset of an unprecedented egree of cultural innovations, in both quality and quantity, as revealed in the archaeological record (Klein 1999). We share the belief with many students of human prehistory that the evolution of anatomically modem humans, the emergence of language, and the burst of cultural innovations, including extensive cave art and sailing across broad expanses of water are events which are all closely linked to each other. Culturally, there have been several major transitions separating us from our prehistoric ancestors-such as the use of fire, the invention of tools, the advent of agriculture, etc. Similarly, there must have been major transitions which led from the primitive growls and howls of our ancestors to the intricate languages we have today. We cannot recover language evolution in the very distant past in ways comparable to those of the archaeologist, since the earliest 'material remains ' of language, i.e., ancient texts, date back no farther than several millennia. However, linguists have developed methods of reconstruction and taxonomy which are helpful toward an interdisciplinary understanding of the diversity of peoples. Indeed the identity of a people is often intimately coupled to the language it speaks. Linguistic grouping has been taken, time and again, to be the ftrst criterion for sorting out human diversity. The celebrated diagram published by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1988), comparing a genetic tree with a linguistic tree, was an eloquent statement on the important parallelisms between genetic evolution and linguistic evolution on a global scale. More locally, when a method developed to quantify genetic affinity was applied to a chain of languages in Micronesia, it was found to yield comparable result