I just got your website at

http://music000001.blogspot.com/2007/07/44-cantometric-map.html,

by googling “interlock and yodel”. I also had my wife play a “hocket” piece, so I knew what on earth you were talking about. You are in such an esoteric field; I imagine you’re in near ecstasy when you find someone like German, who can intelligently read what you have to offer. I’m rather awestruck, considering the amount of work that must have been involved at collecting data from all over Africa.

Good research is such a slow and tedious process. I am reminded of chemists who dedicated much of their academic careers to the pursuit of understanding one protein, only to see the whole field explode into frenzied activity with the arrival of new investigative techniques. Even so, the academics of today seem unable to assemble this plethora of data into meaningful models. What we’ve come up with is something of a Monet painting: It can only be appreciated from a distance, yet the academic community rewards those most adept at analyzing the colors in the individual squiggles of paint.

You two pictures of groups of Africans and Alpine Europeans, both performing with identical instruments in their respective native surroundings, speaks volumes about cultural dispersal — or incredible coincidence. It’s not my field, so I can’t say which it is.

I’m writing this nearly a year after you posted, so you may never read it. Just a reality check on the tens of thousands of years you mention for these mutation events to happen. I couldn’t let that slide. One problem with genetic studies, is that there is NO absolute time scale to work with. Mutations are individual chemical events which do NOT require hundreds or thousands of years to happen.

I worked for a while as an organic chemist, and am familiar with some long-lasting chemical reactions — namely, the manufacture of resins. Resins require a LONG time to react (by which I mean, sometimes over a day at kettle temperature), because they grow into very large, unweildy molecules that are slow to properly present reactive sites at the appropriate orientation towards incoming reactants. Some other reactions, such as those in pharmaceutical-type syntheses, are purposely made to react slowly (a matter of a few days), in order to minimize the production of unwanted side products.

I also spent a few years in solid-state inorganic chemistry, doing high-temperature oven reactions to produce crystals. These mimiced, after a fashion, rock-forming reactions in nature, which usually occur under conditions of great temperature and pressure. They don’t take a long time to happen in a geological sense: Once the reactants arrive at the appropriate conditions of temperature and pressure, they don’t take any longer to completely react than my laboratory experiments. Even long processes such as erosion of rocks do not take long in a geological timeframe: Try reading a marble tombstone from only 100 years ago, and you will see that this process happens rather quickly.

Mutations of DNA base pairs happen almost instantaneously, in comparison to the above reactions. DNA molecules are repeatedly being “unzipped” and reconstructed as twins through reaction with reactant molecules in the cell. It’s not a slow, sloshy affair like the making of a paint resin: every unzipped base pair is a highly reactive site. The reactants have a shape specificity that makes the process something like a child assembling a jigsaw puzzle through trial and error. Occasionally, a “near fit” gets let slip; but the body has control mechanisms to minimize this sort of thing, such as proteins that zip along the DNA strand at lightning speed to make repairs.

What takes a lot of “time” in making a mutation, is actually the extremely low PROBABILITY of a mis-matched base pair escaping detection long enough to survive to the next “unzipping”, at which time it can perpetuate itself by pairing with its natural mate. Other unusual ambient events could occur to cause mutations, such as the presence of free radicals. I’m not familiar enough with the subject to freely discourse on it.

The bottom line is that these processes are not slow, drawn-out processes, but nearly instantaneous events, which happen or don’t happen because of some aberration in the system: a protein malfunctioning, or an ambient free radical; and these aberrations are much more likely to be the result of changing ambient conditions than they are of time. The bulk of human mutations could actually have occurred during a period of intense solar radiation, or because of some social habit such as wearing trousers, or because of a geologic or near-space catastrophe such as a meteor impact, which momentarily altered atmospheric radiation levels; or of eating a peculiar free-radical-rich diet. There is no smoothness or regularity in this matter, so there is no actual “clock” to date things by. This is the great pitfall of studying genetic data in isolation, divorced from corraborating evidence from other disciplines such as linguistics, genealogy and archealogy.

“I am sympathetic with Stock’s separation of Pygmy music from Khoisan music, just because I think Pygmies share ancestry with Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan, while Khoisans (at least in my data are closer to North America and Australia; for instance, they share such a unique grammatical feature as “kinship verbs” with North American and Australian languages).”

This blows me away! you’re connecting Khosians with Australians with North Americans! I’m not an anthropologist nor linguist; just an interested onlooker; but years ago I noticed a superficial resemblance between Niger-Congo and Austronesian languages. I can’t remember what the connections was, other than the initial “ng” and tonality. Of course, my greatest foreign language exposure was with Vietnamse, which has both features, so you can understand my interest. I remember seeing some sort of Australian-American connection as well, but can’t remember what it was. The explanation that intuitively came to mind was that this was something of a “fairy ring” effect. “Fairy rings” are growth patterns of some mushrooms, which advance on a “ring” front over the years, as the “core” area of soil gets depleted. I thought these were caused by successive waves (literally) of migration from a central area in the Middle East. Doesn’t that make more sense than a beachcombing espedition from Mombassa to Venice Beach? I admit, I’m just a duffer.

Victor: “And it was not based on how one practice is derived from another, but on how a certain set of practices might have survived intact over tens of thousands of years and tens of thousands of miles. Resulting in the existence of an “archaic” cultural practice at the endpoint of a long migration rather than at the beginning.”

German: But my immediate thoughts are: “But how would we document this early migration that resulted in such a dramatic inversion of cultural properties beyond postulating it apriori? At the same time, how would we explain the loss of all those very properties in the homeland?”

German, I was raised in Milwaukee, WI, which was at that time the most German city in America. In school, all my close friends played a card game called “schafkopf”, which at the time was only played in Wisconsin. It was a very popular game in the 1800s in Germany, but had become unpopular ther in the 20th century. When I became a chemist, I worked with a fellow chemist who was very fond of his German heritage, and had made many trips to the “old country”. Once, someone from the “old country” came over and noted some of the “German” things we did in Milwaukee. He said, “Ah — that’s the way we USED TO do such and such; but we don’t do that anymore.”

There was another incident, where the US President hired on a Polish-American as an interpreter. He drew guffaws from the crowd at something he interpreted, but was at a loss as to why. Later, someone informed him that what he said, while considered very proper decades ago, was now spoken only in dirty jokes.

Cases of the most ancient custom getting dispersed, where it is lost in the homeland, abound everywhere. I’m told that Icelandic is more conservative than any other Scandanavian language, and that Lithuanian (far from the epicenter of Indo-European language spread) was the most conservative IE language. Applying this reasoning to your statement,

“Africans contain only 25% of “human” mtDNA markers, Europeans 50%, Asians 75% and American Indians close to 100%”,

I think I’m beginning to see possibilities: Native Americans may indeed be the “oldest” race on earth, in that they retain the most original mtDNA markers. That does not preclude their having migrated to America from somewhere else. Of course, the same conditions would have to apply as in the “schafkopf” case: their retention of the markers would have to have come through lack of contact with conditions that would lead to attrition of the markers. In the case of our playing schafkopf, we were somehow more interested in preserving a unique German (and therefore “Milwaukean” — I’m not even German) identity than the Germans were. I can understand how this could happen with cultural items: The Germans were secure in their identity, and therefore less concerned about losing it than we were; but how can this thinking be extended to something physical such as DNA markers?

If the American Indians were an “old” population living originally in, say, Siberia, what caused other peoples to lose their markers while they retained them? Perhaps their isolation in Siberia, or the Caucasus, or wherever they originally came from, had a conserving quality; while founder effects and bottlenecks attritted the others.

There you have it — a theory that is neither MRE, OOAf nor OOAm, that accounts for the “genetic markers” problem. It’s “OOTME” (out of the Middle East), which I’m pre-disposed towards. The greatest bottleneck would then have been the Sahara, which may have been crossable at some point only by the Nile valley.

“I think it unfortunate that you are going to be spending so much of your energy defending what looks like an indefensible interpretation”.

So far, there’s nothing German said that looks “indefensible”. He isn’t foisting OOAm as a “done deal”; he’s just proposing it as a counter to OOAf, so a legitimate debate can take place that examines ALL the evidence from a diversity of disciplines. I think, therefore, that you didn’t use the term “indefensible” because you thought German’s theories were unbelievable or wrong; you simply viewed German’s position as a scientist being judged by a haughty, intractible scientific aristocracy. You’re advising German, in essence “not to make waves”.

I only have a MS in Chemistry, Victor, because I spent my life doing things I thought were more important: building relationships, helping people in need, raising my children. I couldn’t see a direct connection between those things — which I felt and still feel to be eminently important — and getting a sheepskin. But I did rise high enough in the academic community, to see the infighting, backslapping and backstabbing that goes on, along with the horrendous pride of many. They equate having dozens or hundreds of students looking at them and hanging on their every word (so they get a good grade on the next test) with wisdom and greatness; and the industry just reeks with evil. You want to spare German of the consequenses of rubbing that beast the wrong way; but I’m afraid that for some, truth actually matters more than this; truth is more beautiful than a gorgeous woman, more valuable than a house full of gold. German might just be one of these; and your well-intended admonition may come to nought…

…but I’ll be glad: not because German has suffered, but because he’s free!

Regarding L-diversity in mtDNA, I very much agree that mutation rate diversity COULD explain the whole phenomenon. DNA molecules have:

(1) a primary structure, a “ladder”-like affair, with the “bases” as “rungs”,

(2) a secondary structure, the “alpha-helix” which winds mainly as a result of energetics within the two stems of the “ladder”, and

(3) a tertiary structure, caused by the DNA strand interacting with neighboring parts of the strand, and with neighboring entities such as proteins.

Each of these structures affects the reactivity of a particular base or strand section towards mutation. We have become familiar with certain “hot” spots on the chain, and base-pair combinations, which are more reactive than others. It wouldn’t surpize me at all, if parts of the “L” strain are extremely reactive.

Another factor, which I have never heard espoused, is the effect of environment on mutation rate. Millions of people put on sunblock every year to avoid exposure to mutation-causing solar radiation. I even heard that the fact that men wear trousers, and therefore inhibit their testes from cooling, produces more mutations than all the atmospheric nuclear testing of the 1950s and 60s. How much more, might the movement of humans from more equable climates to hot places like India and Africa have caused more mutations? Diet is also a potential culprit. The bottom line is, that mutation rates need not be and are not identical to one another.

By the way, a mutation takes only nanoseconds, if that, to happen: It doesn’t take tens, hundreds or thousands of years. What we call a mutation “rate”, is more properly called a mutation “probability”; and that probability must be applied to ambient conditions.

I have encountered DNA studies quit often in my genealogical research. The DNA testing service provides “ballpark” estimates about probable times to the “most recent common ancestor”; but when comparing these to the paperwork data, based on contemporary records, some of these results were clearly hit “out of the ballpark”. Moreover, there are many, many cases where definitely unrelated individuals are closer matches than definitely related ones (because of back-mutations). You no doubt know all this; I’m only mentioning it, to reinforce what you said about the need for an interworking on these matters between people in widely differing disciplines.

Simply put, you’re a smartass. Who in his right mind would want to hear anything you have to say?

First of all, I need to repeat something I posted elsewhere to German: When speaking of “origins”, we need to be aware that that the environment that fostered rapid growth and subsequent dissemination of, say, a kinship system or musical style, needn’t be the same as the environment that fostered the development (if the evolutionary model is correct) of opposing thumbs, or of their use in making tools. German could be entirely correct in postulating that kinship systems used throughout the world today originated in America; at the same time the music of today may have originated in the Middle East and our genetic ancestor may have come from Africa.

I cannot say where our biological ancestors came from, based on the DNA evidence I’ve seen so far. I am a retired chemist, and I do not have access to the resources that could satisfy my curiosity on this matter. I would like to know, IN DETAIL, what the key mutations are, upon which various DNA “trees” have been based; but I can’t find anything of the sort on the Internet.

I have been deeply involved in genealogical research for several years, though, and I know that DNA evidence is rather useless unless it can be correlated with some sort of paper trail. We have many genealogies on record, the most well-known being those in the Bible, which go back several thousand years; and they point back to origins of HISTORICAL MAN in the Middle East. I believe it is no coincidence, that TECHNOLOGICAL MAN — man capable of making tools, successively, from copper, bronze and iron — originated in the Middle East. It also seems apparent that LITERATE MAN, the inventor of the cuneiform script and subsequently of the alphabet, came from the Middle East. Whether or not these people were preceded by some primal sort of APE MAN in Africa, does not negate the overwhelming evidence that “Cultured Man”, “Capable Man”, “Powerful Man, able to fill the earth” originated in the Middle East.

As I said, I am a Chemist by training and not an Anthropologist (Charles Darwin, by comparison, was trained as a Theologian). I cannot speak with great authority on these matters, but I hope you can appreciate my common sense. Colin McEvedy, in “The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History”, said, concerning the arrival of the Neolithic Revolution,

“The contrast between a temporary mesolithic camp and a village of neolithic farmers is certainly striking enough to justify the term ‘neolithic revolution’, but just as modern technology mkes its most drmatic appearance in backward countries, so the neolithic was at its most ‘revolutionary’ when, in its fully developed form, it spread beyond the Near-Eastern area where it had evolved into mesolithic Europe, Africa and Asia.”

McEvedy thus makes an analogy between technological breakthroughs in the ancient world, with the encroachment of European civilization and technology upon the American Indians (yes, p.c. is “Native Americans”. My ancestors were these people, so what of it?). In North America, where the cultural divide was the greatest, the original inhabitants were all but anihilated. Even at that, the “cultural divide” was not as great as some seem to suppose. In the early days of settlement, for instance, the Mohawks had stronger forts and more adequate housing than the settlers. They learned very quickly how to use the newcomers’ weapons, and some of their number were even schooled in European schools and well able to transform their societies. The natives resisted these efforts, though — not because of ignorance, but because on a plane of thinking that was meaningful to them, it was better to fade into near-extinction than to become aliens to themselves and to their ancestors and survive.

Just translate this thinking to primitive people faced with the neolithic revolution, the copper age, etc., and you can see the pattern for subsequent population groups at least POTENTIALLY exterminating those who lived before them. This is the current reasoning behind the disappearance of the Neanderthanls, and it is not too great a stretch to extend this reasoning to all ancient peoples.

Our PHYSICAL ancestors, then, whatever “ape-men” or “pig-men” some may suppose them to have sprung from, out of Africa or elsewhere, more likely than not came from the Middle East. By extension, that is probably where musical styles and kinship systems began — unless, of course, one can conclusively prove otherwise.

A word on things “primitive”, which you may concur with: A man using stone tools, who hunts and gathers rather than farming, is not necessarily primitive. If you want to disprove me, get yourself a deerhide bow, a tinderbox and some primitive stone tools and set out, say, in January, to live in the wilderness. I dare say, you will not fare very well. Our “primitive” ancestors were extremely smart people, able to live in the harshest of environments while travelling very light. They lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle because their numbers were few and game was plentiful. It would have made no sense, for them to lug an anvil around with them on which to forge metal tools. People who lived in the easy-to-irrigate plain of Mesopotamia, on the other hand, would find farming and metalworking to be far more useful.

So, why did some tribes practice polyphony and others not? Why do WE do it? Two reasons: (1) we have technologically advanced, to where we can produce well-tuned instruments, and (2) we are able to write down and transmit, over miles and generations, every tune we play. Where these factors were absent, one could expect the record to be spotty; and it is. Give a “primitive” man an instrument, and teach him to play it in an orchestra, and he may even become a prodigy: He (or she, p.c.) doesn’t have to “evolve” into anything — all he needs is the tools, and the desire. Likewise, put a master pianist like Wladyslaw Szpilman in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he will become a common laborer, pushing a wheelbarrow: What he DOES depends on his circumstances. So it was with out ancestors; they needn’t have “evolved” forward or back; they simply needed to undergo a change of environment.

All that said, I’ve enjoyed the discussion. Thanks for contributing.

I am a hobbyist in fields such as linguistics and anthropology, my degrees being in computer science and chemistry; but I have been interested in both the former fields for several decades. Years ago, I was intrigued, upon reading the Funk and Wagnalls article on American Indian Languages, to see the incredible diversity of grammatical and sound variations they contain. I was fluent in Vietnamese language at the time, and recall having had some minor challenge in pronouncing the initial “ng” sound, distinguishing between aspirated and unaspirated “t”s, and acquiring an ear for tonality; but otherwise, it was not too difficult for this Indo-European speaker to speak and write as an Austronesian. I would have a great deal of difficulty, however, learning the plethora of linguistic devices employed by my Native American ancestors and their kin, though — such as ergartive typology, switch reference, verbal directionals, voceless “l”s, lateral affricatives, glottalized consonants and much more.

I wanted to see what other languages had these attributes, and learned, to my surprize, that languages of the “Old World” were actually less diverse than those in America. A few years later, Dr. Joseph Greenburg’s work was published, I believe, in Science magazine, which seemed to confirm my findings to a degree. First of all, Greenburg postulated that most humans spoke a group of related languages known as “Nostratic”, and most of the remainder spoke languages in the “Basque-Denean” group. I believe Greenburg himself proposed that all of his groups originated, not too many thousand years ago, in the Middle East.

We known that Greenburg was a “lumper” rather than a splitter; as you have noted, he greatly erred in lumping together the bulk of American languages into a super-group called “Amerind”. I was rather surprized myself to see this grouping, for I saw more structural similarities between languages in “Old World” groups, such as Nilo-Saharan and Austronesian, than I saw between those in the single “Amerind” group. Of course, this was Greenburg’s field and not mine, so I took his word for it. What DID interest me, even so, was that the greatest diversity of languages occurred at the PERIPHERY of his “spread zone”, not at the center. This caused me to wonder, years later, when I saw anthropological DNA studies based on the assumption that the areas of greatest diversity were assumed to be at the CENTER of such spreading.

This all seemed rather counter-intuitive. The border of Sudan with neighboring Chad and Ethiopia, for instance, is peppered with many small, diverse language families. I reasoned that these small, endangered groups congregated near the borders as a protection against being wiped out by vindictive policies of governments on either side — as the current genocide among the Fur, one such small group, amply illustrates. It would be unreasonable, on the other hand, to assume that these desert areas of great diversity were centers, out of which the greater neighboring civilizations flowed; yet this seems to be the very thinking of anthropologists, and it is the principal argument I have seen in promoting the “Out of Africa” theory. You seem to be contending that an “Out of America” theory is valid for the same reason — that it is America, in fact, where the greatest diversity is found.

You noted that African and American populations are “polar opposites” genetically; so that if the African populations were more ancient, it follows that the Americans should be more recent arrivals, and visa-versa. In likening this “genetic tree” to a “yardstick” with two “ends”, you touch upon something else I’ve noticed in this field of study: The Out of Africa “tree” doesn’t look like a “tree” at all, but a rather lopsided affair. If the mtDNA tree were rooted, for instance, in Hg “N” (common among aboriginal Australians but also present in the Middle East) instead of one of the “L” groups in Africa, the branches would have a much more even spread. A similar correction would result from rooting the yDNA tree in, say, “IJ”. Both adjustments would correlate with Greenburg’s model of the dispersion of languages. I cannot say anything definitive about where to root the DNA trees, other than to say that the rooting used in the “Out of Africa” model appears arbitray and perhaps is biased. This hearkens back to the “upstream” arguments of Luis.

You said something which ought to shine a light on this matter, namely,

“…the original mtDNA tree was rooted in the restriction site combination found at 100% of American Indians with the decreasing frequency thereof among Asians, Europeans and Africans.”

Could you amplify this for me? I am not a social scientist, and am too old to learn the lingo. I DO know that mutations, such as those occurring in mtDNA base arrangements, are generally reversible; so one can’t make assumptions as to whether a particular mutation is “uphill” or “downhill”; and therefore, where a tree ought to be “rooted”.

I will note that, given Greenburg’s calculation that the dispersion of languages began only a few thousand years ago, physical anthropologists can shout linguists right out of the room when discussing theories of “origins”. Their argument is that since man evolved “out of Africa” millions of years ago, then language — being a very recent phenomenon of man’s development — is not a proper basis for studying “origins”. I can’t fault them on that sort of thinking, providing that their assumptions are correct. As you have noted, those assumptions are based on a very sparse, spotty corpus of fossil evidence — enhanced, it seems, by a biased interpretation of genetic data. In any case, the “cradle” of the human gene pool and the “cradle” of human languages needn’t be the same place: the environment needed to foster the one is not necessarily that which engenders the other.

I do not subscribe to the “Out of America” theory, which of course neither have you explicitly done. I am, like you, skeptical of the “Out of Africa” theory; though I would like some more elucidation from you on this matter. There are many places on earth where human existence could have begun: not only Africa and America, but also India and Southeast Asia — or, given that the earth’s climate has varied considerably over the millenia, even the Biblical “Eden” in the Middle East. The book doesn’t seem to be closed on these matters, except, perhaps, in the minds of some privileged academics; and I am glad to see honest enquiry still seeing the light of day.

Thank you for your good work. I look forward to hearing something from you on these points.