- •Summary Contents
- •Detailed Contents
- •Figures
- •Tables
- •Preface
- •The Disciplinary Players
- •Broad Perspectives
- •Some Key Guiding Principles
- •Why Did Agriculture Develop in the First Place?
- •The Significance of Agriculture vis-a-vis Hunting and Gathering
- •Group 1: The "niche" hunter-gatherers of Africa and Asia
- •Group 3: Hunter-gatherers who descend from former agriculturalists
- •To the Archaeological Record
- •The Hunter-Gatherer Background in the Levant, 19,000 to 9500 ac (Figure 3.3)
- •The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (ca. 9500 to 8500 Bc)
- •The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (ca. 8500 to 7000 Bc)
- •The Spread of the Neolithic Economy through Europe
- •Southern and Mediterranean Europe
- •Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece
- •The Balkans
- •The Mediterranean
- •Temperate and Northern Europe
- •The Danubians and the northern Mesolithic
- •The TRB and the Baltic
- •The British Isles
- •Hunters and farmers in prehistoric Europe
- •Agricultural Dispersals from Southwest Asia to the East
- •Central Asia
- •The Indian Subcontinent
- •The domesticated crops of the Indian subcontinent
- •The consequences of Mehrgarh
- •Western India: Balathal to jorwe
- •Southern India
- •The Ganges Basin and northeastern India
- •Europe and South Asia in a Nutshell
- •The Origins of the Native African Domesticates
- •The Archaeology of Early Agriculture in China
- •Later Developments (post-5000 ec) in the Chinese Neolithic
- •South of the Yangzi - Hemudu and Majiabang
- •The spread of agriculture south of Zhejiang
- •The Background to Agricultural Dispersal in Southeast Asia
- •Early Farmers in Mainland Southeast Asia
- •Early farmers in the Pacific
- •Some Necessary Background
- •Current Opinion on Agricultural Origins in the Americas
- •The Domesticated Crops
- •Maize
- •The other crops
- •Early Pottery in the Americas (Figure 8.3)
- •Early Farmers in the Americas
- •The Andes (Figure 8.4)
- •Amazonia
- •Middle America (with Mesoamerica)
- •The Southwest
- •Thank the Lord for the freeway (and the pipeline)
- •Immigrant Mesoamerican farmers in the Southwest?
- •Issues of Phylogeny and Reticulation
- •Introducing the Players
- •How Do Languages Change Through Time?
- •Macrofamilies, and more on the time factor
- •Languages in Competition - Language Shift
- •Languages in competition - contact-induced change
- •Indo-European
- •Indo-European from the Pontic steppes?
- •Where did PIE really originate and what can we know about it?
- •Colin Renfrew's contribution to the Indo-European debate
- •Afroasiatic
- •Elamite and Dravidian, and the Inds-Aryans
- •A multidisciplinary scenario for South Asian prehistory
- •Nilo-Saharan
- •Niger-Congo, with Bantu
- •East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific
- •The Chinese and Mainland Southeast Asian language families
- •Austronesian
- •Piecing it together for East Asia
- •"Altaic, " and some difficult issues
- •The Trans New Guinea Phylum
- •The Americas - South and Central
- •South America
- •Middle America, Mesoamerica, and the Southwest
- •Uto-Aztecan
- •Eastern North America
- •Algonquian and Muskogean
- •Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan
- •Did the First Farmers Spread Their Languages?
- •Do genes record history?
- •Southwest Asia and Europe
- •South Asia
- •Africa
- •East Asia
- •The Americas
- •Did Early Farmers Spread through Processes of Demic Diffusion?
- •Homeland, Spread, and Friction Zones, plus Overshoot
- •Notes
- •References
- •Index
The Americas
The Americas do not offer very rich data on specific questions of farming population and language family ancestry, and I must also confess to a lack of access to many of the relevant sources. But a few observations are of great interest. For instance, Sloan Williams and colleagues (2002) note that modem Yanomama village populations in Venezuela and Brazil, with high levels of within-village endogamy, can be clearly differentiated from each other in terms of nuclear genetic markers. The genetic distances between these village populations also correlate well with their recorded histories of fission. In addition, Nelson Fagundes and colleagues (2002) have found that mtDNA relationships follow linguistic relationships very clearly amongst Tupianspeakers in Brazil. This is very hopeful news for those interested in tracking the populations associated with language families back through time.
But when Williams et al. used mtDNA sequences as opposed to nuclear genetic data for differentiating Yanomama village populations, they were found not to work so well, apparently owing to sex-specific migration and sampling issues. In this regard, therefore, it is interesting that Ripan Malhi and colleagues (2003) suggest that mtDNA haplotypes in Mexico and the US Southwest relate more to geography than to language groupings. They state that early UtoAztecan languages were spread by male rather than female migrations, the former perhaps being identifiable through the wide distribution of a nuclear marker called Albumin*Mexico. The prospect of females staying close to home and males migrating makes a degree of sense, but one wonders how the claimed results reflect sampling and other factors.
In addition, the Americas were settled so recently in time that the major degree of biological differentiation that we see between populations of Old World origin has never had time to develop. Most population movements in the past, especially incremental rather than long-distance ones, would probably have mingled people already quite closely related in terms of genetic descent. If the Americas are to provide genetic data useful for questions of farming dispersal, much more research will be needed.