Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 472  George van Driem   ancestors of that community. Moreover, the wave of anatomically modern humans who introduced the proto-languages that were later to give rise to today’s Asian linguistic phyla and language isolates can be dated to between 25,000 to 38,000 years ago [Rasmussen et al . 2011]. The antiquity of Y chro- mosomal haplogroups such as O1 or O2 has been estimated to be greater than 10,000 years old [Yan et al . 2011]. Yet historical linguists generally estimate the linguistically reconstructible past to be shallower than 10,000 years, and this temporal gap must temper and inform all speculations regarding correla- tions between linguistic and genetic affinity. 2. The linguistic event horizon and beyond Early human populations outside of Africa no doubt must have interacted with each other in parapatric or sympatric modes at various junctures in their long prehistory. There were numerous waves of peopling, and the genetic evidence is compatible with sustained and multiple migrations out of Africa through the Levant over time. Evidence has been adduced of gene flow from the now extinct Denisovans into the ancestors of the people who ultimately settled Melanesia [Reich et al . 2010], and Neanderthals evidently introduced a minor paternal contribution into the ancestors of all non-Africans at the time that these populations had emerged from Africa but before Eurasian groups had diverged from each other, whilst modern humans have apparently retained no Neanderthal maternal lineages [Green et al . 2010; Rasmussen et al . 2011; Currat and Excoffier 2011]. Despite this paternal contribution, it has been suggested that our Cro-Magnon ancestors may have outcompeted the Neanderthals because of a more finely honed language aptitude, or because religious belief systems and a wrathful God may have made Cro-Magnon the more hostile adversary [van Driem 2001]. All Australian Y chromosomal lineages belong to either haplogroups C and F, both of which left Africa between 75,000 to 62,000 years ago. All Australian mitochondrial DNA lineages fall within the founder branches M and N. A study of M42 coding region sequences in the mitochondrial lineage of Indian and Australian aboriginal populations supported the colonisation of Australia via a southern littoral route at this time depth [Kumar et al . 2007, Hudjashov et al . 2007; Stanyon et al . 2009; Rasmussen et al . 2011]. Austral- ian maternal lineages are most closely related to those of New Guinea and Melanesia and reflect the same Palaeolithic colonisation event some 50,000 years ago. It comes as no surprise that the deep branching of both the mater- nal and the paternal lineages of Australian populations vis-à-vis other popu-