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Post by epictetus on Sept 15, 2016 16:54:27 GMT 10
I might be a pedant, but I think when we post substantial quotes from other sources we should usually cite the reference. I know it's just a men's conversation forum, not an academic journal, but I like to know where things come from. The other day I was taken to task for quoting some figures that one member said didn't make sense. I hadn't cited the reference and when I looked for it couldn't find it. Egg on face.
Alan, I'm sure the Blue Chilli information you posted is of real importance, but technological innovation has limited interest for me. Some of the guys on this forum, though, are right into it so you'll probably get some responses. I hope so.
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Post by alans on Sept 16, 2016 8:59:49 GMT 10
Apologies. The quotes were from Forum Australia of which I am a contributor. I thought they were self evident since the writers were identified.
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Post by alans on Sept 24, 2016 10:22:51 GMT 10
Interesting article in The Guardian science section today. Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms Clues left in genes of modern populations in Australian and Papua New Guinea enable scientists to trace remarkable journey made by first human explorers A new population analysis of Indigenous Australians and Papuans shows they can trace their origins back to the very first arrivals on the continent about 50,000 years ago. Claims that Indigenous Australians are the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth have been backed by the first extensive study of their DNA, which dates their origins to more than 50,000 years ago. Scientists were able to trace the remarkable journey made by intrepid ancient humans by sifting through clues left in the DNA of modern populations in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The analysis shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to cross an ocean, and reveals evidence of prehistoric liaisons with an unknown hominin cousin. Prof Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist who led the work at the University of Copenhagen, said: “This story has been missing for a long time in science. Now we know their relatives are the guys who were the first real human explorers. Our ancestors were sitting being kind of scared of the world while they set out on this exceptional journey across Asia and across the sea.” The findings appear in one of four major human origins papers published in Nature this week, which together give an unprecedented insight into how humans first migrated out of the African continent, splintered into distinct populations and spread across the globe. Willerslev’s findings, based on a new population analysis of 83 Indigenous Australians and 25 Papuans, shows that these groups can trace their origins back to the very first arrivals on the continent about 50,000 years ago and that they remained almost entirely isolated until around 4,000 years ago. “They are probably the oldest group in the world that you can link to one particular place,” said Willerslev. En route to Australia, early humans would have encountered a motley assortment of other roving hominin species, including an unknown human relative who has now been shown to have contributed around 4% to the Indigenous Australian genome. Previously, scientists have discovered that prehistoric couplings have left all non-Africans today carrying 1-6% of Neanderthal DNA. Willerslev said the latest findings added to the view that Neanderthals and other now extinct hominins, traditionally portrayed as low-browed prehistoric thugs, were “in reality not particularly different” from our own ancestors. Adding to this picture, a second study found that the advent of modern human behaviours around 100,000 years ago, indicated by cave art and more sophisticated tools, does not appear to have been accompanied by any notable genetic mutations. “Your genome contains the history of every ancestor you ever had,” said Swapan Mallick, a geneticist at Havard Medical School who led the analysis of the genomes of people from 142 distinct populations. The study also suggests that the KhoeSan (bushmen) and Mbuti (central African pygmies) populations appear to have split off from other early humans sooner than this, again suggesting that there was no intrinsic biological change that suddenly triggered human culture. “There is no evidence for a magic mutation that made us human,” said Willerslev. Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said the findings would be controversial in the field, adding: “It either means that the behaviours were developed earlier, they developed these behaviours independently, they acquired them through exchanges of ideas with other groups, or the estimated split times are too old.” Willerslev’s study also resolves the apparent discrepancy between genetic findings implying that Indigenous populations have been in Australia for tens of thousands of years and the fact that the languages spoken by these populations are only around 4,000 years old. “You see a movement of people spreading across the continent and leaving signatures across the continent,” said Willerslev. “That is the time that this new language has spread. It’s a tiny genetic signature. It’s almost like two guys entering a village and saying ‘guys, now we have to speak another language and use another stone tool and they have a little bit of sex in that village and then they disappear again.” Aubrey Lynch, an Indigenous elder from the Goldfields area, said: “This study confirms our beliefs that we have ancient connections to our lands and have been here far longer than anyone else.”
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Post by epictetus on Sept 25, 2016 20:46:44 GMT 10
Willerslev’s study also resolves the apparent discrepancy between genetic findings implying that Indigenous populations have been in Australia for tens of thousands of years and the fact that the languages spoken by these populations are only around 4,000 years old. “You see a movement of people spreading across the continent and leaving signatures across the continent,” said Willerslev. “That is the time that this new language has spread. It’s a tiny genetic signature. It’s almost like two guys entering a village and saying ‘guys, now we have to speak another language and use another stone tool and they have a little bit of sex in that village and then they disappear again.” What did I miss? I didn't read the article all that carefully as it was a bit dense for me at this time of night, but how does the study resolve the supposed mismatch between the age of the oldest Aboriginal language we know and the preceding date of arrival? Admittedly the oldest languages we know may well - presumably were - creoles, i.e. languages that evolved from pidgins spoken by people who had to communicate with people who didn't know each other's native language. Tok Pisin, an official language of PNG, is an example of a creole, as are Torres Strait Creole and Roper River Kriol. A creole emerges when it becomes someone's mother tongue. So when they talk about the two guys going into the village and having to learn a new language, then it's not a case of foreigners learning the villagers' mother tongue, but both the newcomers and the villagers creating between them a third language which then becomes the mother tongue of later generations. These new languages, the creoles, are the ones that date back 4,000 years and are spoken by people who've been around for much longer. Those people originally spoke a native language that has been lost, and itself evolved through creolisation as the different tribes on the Australian continent met up with each other, traded, intermarried, and so on. So where's the discrepancy, and how have the new findings resolved it?
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Post by alans on Sept 26, 2016 9:49:29 GMT 10
I think they are implying that the discrepancy between communication skills and the spread of humanity has been resolved. If humans left Africa in two or three major migrations and wandered to different parts of the world the assumption was that they took their language with them. However, they are now suggesting that there was no language as we understand the concept, so dating a civilisation by studying the change in language is no longer applicable. That, at least is what I understand the author as implying. However, I am not a trained scientist so have to accept a lot more than I would wish from so called experts.
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Post by mipela on Sept 28, 2016 11:51:31 GMT 10
Hmmm. I'm reading but not commenting apart from this reply post here as the forum seems to be struggling for support. I've no interest in such obscure subjects but maybe, I'll learn something. Mipela.
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Post by epictetus on Sept 28, 2016 21:42:38 GMT 10
Hmmm. I'm reading but not commenting apart from this reply post here as the forum seems to be struggling for support. I've no interest in such obscure subjects but maybe, I'll learn something. Mipela. Well, Mip, you know about Tok Pisin, so you know about creolisation, the creation of a new language from a pidgin. (A pidgin is no one's mother tongue; a creole is.) Way back in the dim darks language as we know it may not have existed, but some form of language did exist. That's what makes us human, whether we're H. Sapiens or H. Neanderthal, and the need for speakers of two different languages to communicate creates a pidgin, which is a simplified language, drawing on the languages of those who need to use the pidgin, but with a reduced grammar. As people began to use the pidgin as their preferred language and passed it on to their kids who then had it as their mother tongue, so the pidgin/now creole became more complex. Tok Pisin at the moment is as complex as it needs to be. If it needs to be more complex and sophisticated it will become so. People may laugh at the compound nouns in Tok Pisin, such as "skrulus" (joint loose = lame), "nekdrai" (throat dry = thirsty) and, of course "mipela", meaning "I" or "me", but no one beats the Germans for compound nouns, so an advanced language can still contain clumsy grammar and vocabulary. Here's a German example: "Fussbodenschleifmaschinenverleih" (floor sanding machine rental). More really long German words are at theweek.com/articles/463500/8-favorite-ridiculously-long-german-words
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Post by cster on Sept 29, 2016 9:01:23 GMT 10
Ah well its not our fault the Germans lost the space bar when typing, we can join all our words together too, but we choose to keep our spaces and our sense of humour intact. hah
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Post by epictetus on Sept 29, 2016 16:57:01 GMT 10
A bit more about the language capacity of Neanderthals and possibly earlier hominids, such as Heidelbergensis, is at the link below. We are all descendants of the Neanderthals. Quote: DNA analysis has revealed that between 1% and 4% of the Eurasian human genome seems to come from Neanderthals.www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25465102
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Post by cster on Sept 29, 2016 18:02:50 GMT 10
Interesting read, I always thought we sang before we spoke
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Post by epictetus on Sept 29, 2016 20:22:54 GMT 10
Interesting read, I always thought we sang before we spoke Maybe we did. We don't know exactly when it would have evolved, but we have some clues in terms of the anatomical underpinnings for singing in particular because singing requires this really intense control over the chest wall muscles that maintain these long, slow exhalations of sound, which incidentally actually provide the precursors for language because that long slow exhalation is absolutely crucial for the production of speech. So without that we would never have had language evolve. So singing clearly evolves before language.Robin Dunbar (Anthropologist) www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-role-of-singing-and-dancing-in-human-evolution/7220576
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Post by Sediba on Feb 27, 2018 19:12:47 GMT 10
This thread has had Thousands and Thousands of views. I resurrected it, people may be interested
The Admin Monkey
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