Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic.

Clicks: 289
ID: 32200
2019
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Emerging

Ranked #97 of 375 articles by views in Nature

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 375 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
The study of language origin and divergence is important for understanding the history of human populations and their cultures. The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world after Indo-European, and there is a long-running debate about its phylogeny and the time depth of its original divergence. Here we perform a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis to examine two competing hypotheses of the origin of the Sino-Tibetan language family: the 'northern-origin hypothesis' and the 'southwestern-origin hypothesis'. The northern-origin hypothesis states that the initial expansion of Sino-Tibetan languages occurred approximately 4,000-6,000 years before present (BP; taken as AD 1950) in the Yellow River basin of northern China, and that this expansion is associated with the development of the Yangshao and/or Majiayao Neolithic cultures. The southwestern-origin hypothesis states that an early expansion of Sino-Tibetan languages occurred before 9,000 years BP from a region in southwest Sichuan province in China or in northeast India, where a high diversity of Tibeto-Burman languages exists today. Consistent with the northern-origin hypothesis, our Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of 109 languages with 949 lexical root-meanings produced an estimated time depth for the divergence of Sino-Tibetan languages of approximately 4,200-7,800 years BP, with an average value of approximately 5,900 years BP. In addition, the phylogeny supported a dichotomy between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages. Our results are compatible with the archaeological records, and with the farming and language dispersal hypothesis of agricultural expansion in China. Our findings provide a linguistic foothold for further interdisciplinary studies of prehistoric human activity in East Asia.
Reference Key
zhang2019phylogeneticnature Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Zhang, Menghan;Yan, Shi;Pan, Wuyun;Jin, Li;
Journal Nature
Year 2019
DOI
10.1038/s41586-019-1153-z
URL
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.