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

 478  George van Driem   beetles [Schmidt et al . 2011] as proxies for assessing moderately lower sum- mer temperatures during the Last Glacial Maximum in southern Tibet are corroborated by studies of endemic flowering plants of the alpine steppe [Miehe et al . 2009, 2012], the Tibetan plateau pika [Ci et al . 2009], yaks [Qi et al . 2008] and monkshood [Wang et al . 2009]. Barley genotyping suggests that the Tibetan plateau may even represent the site of an independent alpine domestication of barley, involving the selective breeding for endurance to cold and drought and distinct from the domestication process which took place in the Fertile Crescent [Dai et al . 2012]. The geological and palaeontological evidence suggests that the Tibetan pla- teau might not yet have been entirely in the rain shadow at the time that anato- mically modern humans spread across Asia, whilst the Kathmandu valley was a large palaeolake amidst verdant mountains 32,000 years ago until as recently as 15,000 years ago. The Himalayan region may very well have harboured suitable habitats for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It has long been proposed that popu- lations adapted to high altitude environments may not have suffered the diseases and parasites endemic to the jungles of the balmy plains [McNeill 1976]. Epide- miology may to a large extent have determined which ancient migrations were able to leave traces in today’s genome and which did not. The ecological barrier between the highlands of the eastern Himalayan region and the lowlands of the Gangetic and Brahmaputran plains must have played a role in shaping popula- tion prehistory and thus the human environment. Today’s limited palaeontological survey data already clearly indicate that populations of hunter-gatherers were present on the Tibetan plateau in Pa- laeolithic times even though the Palaeolithic of this region is still virtually unknown [Madsen et al . 2006; Brantingham et al . 2007]. Genetic adaptations to the cold and to high altitude in populations of the Tibetan plateau are of a physiological sophistication suggestive of a long gradual evolution [Zhao et al . 2009; Yi et al . 2010; Xu et al . 2011; Wang et al . 2011; Peng et al . 2011; Qi et al . 2013]. At the same time, the ancient paternal lineage D, which is wide- spread in Tibet and throughout the central and eastern Himalayas attests to an ancient wave of peopling which passed through the Himalayan corridor [Qian et al . 2000]. These findings have been construed as support for the existence of cryptic refugia at high elevations during the Last Glacial Maximum. 4. East Asian and the linguistic event horizon The East Asian linguistic hypothesis was proposed by Stanley Staros- ta in Périgueux in 2001, a year before he died of congestive heart failure in Hawai‘i. Starosta conceived East Asian as an ancient linguistic phylum