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

 507  The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory   Indo-Europeans and retained the originally predominant Elamo-Dravidian haplogroup L at the highest frequency. By contrast, the Brahui retained the original Dravidian language of their ancestors and consequently also inheri- ted the lower social status of the subjugated Indus population. Ironically, the lower status connected with the retention of a pre-Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic identity rendered the Brahui language community more prone to male-biased genetic contributions from incursive Indo-European groups through hyper- gamy practised by succeeding generations of Brahui women. Confronted with the overwhelming growing body of evidence demonstrat- ing the prevalence of the Father Tongue correlation, [Forster and Renfrew 2011: 1391] impute the spread of language families to ‘emigrating agricultu- ralists’ who ‘took local wives’. This interpretation is a transparent attempt to succour Bellwood and Renfrew’s embattled First Farmers hypothesis, which seeks to ascribe the founding dispersals of language families to the spread of agriculture [Bellwood and Renfrew 2002]. Those collaborating with Renfrew continue to seek Y chromosomal correlates for the spread of the agricultural horizon in the Neolithic, even when the reasoning continues to be strained and the purported correlates are not manifestly evident, e. g. [Arun Kumar et al . 2012]. In order to buttress Renfrew’s widely doubted hypothesis of an Indo- European homeland inAsia Minor, Forster and Renfrew propose a correlation of Indo-European with the Y chromosomal haplogroup J2a. In a similar vein, [Wolff 2010] attributes the spread of the language fami- lies Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian, Kradai, Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic all to the spread of rice cultivation, a highly simplistic view criticised by [Blust 2011]. In fact, it remains moot whether any part of Y chromosomal phylogeography correlates well with the spread of the Neolithic horizon. Not every population movement led to the spread of a language phylum, and population movements are not uniform in nature. Whether during the exodus of anatomically modern humans out of Africa or at the shallow time depth of the peopling of Oceania byAustronesian popu- lations, the colonisation of previously uninhabited lands invariably involved both sexes and the introduction of a linguistic phylum. During the Neolithic horizon, the spread of farming was necessarily a sedentary and incremental process, which likewise must mostly have involved both sexes. Early farmers might only have been able to spread their language at times of great surplus and concomitant population growth, perhaps sometimes involving the estab- lishment of agricultural colonies elsewhere. By contrast, the modern ethnolin- guistic composition of Asian populations must be understood, at least in part, as having resulted from male-biased linguistic intrusions, whether motivated by conquest, land grab or the urge to seek out new habitats.