Model for the spread of Transeurasian (Macro-Altaic) communities with farming

Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese: A case of farming/language dispersal, by Martine Robbeets, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a hypothesis reconciling Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in the Japanese language, explaining the spread of the Japanic languages through farming dispersal. To this end, I identify the original speech community of the Transeurasian language family as the Neolithic Xinglongwa culture situated in the West Liao River Basin in the sixth millennium bc. I argue that the separation of the Japanic branch from the other Transeurasian languages and its spread to the Japanese Islands can be understood as occurring in connection with the dispersal of millet agriculture and its subsequent integration with rice agriculture. I further suggest that a prehistorical layer of borrowings related to rice agriculture entered Japanic from a sister language of proto-Austronesian, at a time when both language families were still situated in the Shandong-Liaodong interaction sphere.

transeurasian-altaic-family
Classification of the Transeurasian languages according to Robbeets ( forthcoming)

Another interesting anthropological model to validate with future genomic analyses, although I was never convinced about a grouping (let alone reconstructible proto-language) beyond Micro-Altaic languages.

NOTE. The Max Planck Institute may be a great source of scientific advancement, but in Linguistics you can see from the projects Indo-European languages originate in Anatolia (2012) and A massive migration from the steppe brought Indo-European languages to Europe (2015) (the last one referring to the Corded Ware culture, associated with the study by Haak et al. 2015) that they have not got it quite right with Proto-Indo-European… I like the traditional approach of this paper, though, including a thorough assessment of archaeological and linguistic details.

Featured images: Left. The eastward spread of millet agriculture in association with ancestral speech communities. Right: The spread of agriculture and language to Japan.

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