Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm Read Free Page B

Cambridge University Press.
    There was a discussion of the
Urheimat
, which is the hypothetical homeland of whatever tribe fathered the first Indo-European language.
    For over a century, scholars had speculated about the location of Urheimat. This volume claimed to know the secret: one of the most fertile lands of the Fertile Crescent, between Ethiopia and Felix Arabia, between the Kebassa plateau and the Red Sea, where the modern city of Asmara rises in Eritrea.
    This is the spot where legend says the Queen of Sheba gave birth to the son of Solomon, Menelich, while history says the ambition of Caesar during his Egyptian campaigns attempted to annex this rich land but failed. Long before Caesar, before Solomon, before even the long-vanished Sabaeans dwelt here, the nameless and primordial tribe of Man walked upright, invented fire, invented language: The first tribe of the first true humans.
    That original band of fire-using early man was less than two thousand breeding individuals. Recent studies in genetics traced all human lineages back to ten sons of a genetic patriarch and eighteen daughters of a genetic matriarch. The Tree of Man is rooted in a single mother, the mitochondrial matriarch, because all other branches fell extinct. The first three lineages that arose from the genetic patriarch spread through Africa. Most paleogeneticists rather fancifully referred to the ancestral genetic markers as Shem, Ham and Japheth. This author, more stolid, designated them Son I, Son II and Son III.
    Son III’s lineage was the one with whom this author was mainly concerned, the line from which races as distinct as Chaldaeans and Cornishmen, Peloponnesians and Paleosiberian Macedonians and Manx arose. Perhaps clutching logs, this clan braved the waters of the Red Sea, those straits the Arabs call
The Gate of Grief
: twenty miles from isle to isle to the coasts of what is now Yemen. From there, Son III and his bloodline migrated to Asia to beget Sons designated IV through X: this great Diaspora of his bloodline reached from the Sea of Japan (Son IV), to Northern India (Son V) to the South Caspian (Sons VI and IX).
    I bent my head over the page. The author speculated about the origins of dialects, and how they grow to form independent languages, and why they change over time. His basic question: since there is such a strong evolutionary incentive for individuals and groups to communicate with each other, either to form alliances in war or partnerships in peace, what possible reason was there for linguistic drift? Why did people form local dialects which rendered them unable to talk to their cousins in the tribe a day’s march away? No other animal signals, birdcalls and suchlike, showed such a strong and rapid drift.
    He saw how you would get special words for birds and beasts in one area not found in another, or why seashore people would have names for tools and nautical terms that mountain-dwelling tribes would lack: but aside from these special cases, whoever
stops
using a word his neighbors and ancestors used, and deliberately starts using a word no one understands?
    The trait of misunderstanding had no evolutionary value, no good reason to exist.
    He did not think it was nurture that caused languages to divide away from each other. He thought it was nature: a genetic disease. This author had written out the transmission vectors of the disease. As best he could from genetic and cultural clues, he tried to identify where it had started, how it had spread.
The Y chromosome lineages are positively associated with the major language groups of the world. In the absence of the genetic drift or defect, there is no correlative grammatical drift…
… the indication is that some primordial catastrophe, of which no record survives, or perhaps garbled as myth, disorganized the genetic and intellectual structure of early man, causing a rapid degeneration from the robust features and larger brain of the Neanderthal, and other transitional