image: This is Foxtail millet, an early and important domesticate in South-East Asia. view more
Credit: Image courtesy of Dorian Fuller (University College London, London)
Researchers report evidence tracing the origin of the Sino-Tibetan languages to northern Chinese millet farmers around 7,200 years ago. Although the Sino-Tibetan group of languages is one of the world's largest, with around 1.4 billion speakers and more than 500 different languages, including Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetan, the origin of the language group remains unclear. Johann-Mattis List, Laurent Sagart, Guillaume Jacques, and colleagues assembled a lexical database containing basic vocabulary used in daily life from 50 Sino-Tibetan languages. The authors identified sets of cognates, or words common to more than one language. Next, the authors constructed a tree of language origins and evolution through time that revealed multiple language subgroups, with a complex pattern of overlapping signals beyond that level, suggesting that the ancestral language arose around 7,200 years ago. The authors also examined cognate sets describing domesticated species to study how agricultural knowledge may have spread through the region. The agricultural analysis supported an origin of the Sino-Tibetan family in northern Chinese communities of millet farmers of the late Cishan and early Yangshao cultures. According to the authors, the most likely expansion scenario involves an initial separation between an eastern group, ancestral to Chinese, and a western group, ancestral to the rest of the Sino-Tibetan languages.
Article #18-17972: "Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan," by Laurent Sagart et al.
MEDIA CONTACT: Johann-Mattis List, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, GERMANY; tel: +49-3641-686-822, +49-1575-2057010; e-mail: list@shh.mpg.de; Laurent Sagart, Centre des Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale, Paris, FRANCE; e-mail: laurent.sagart@gmail.com
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