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Comment by runsWphotons | Hacker News Reader

Looks like this is quite old...they will probably find even more introgression. Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago), so there basically had to be a substantial amount of gene flow as well. Only a minority of the aboriginal languages come from an earlier substrate. It would be surprising if there doesn't also emerge evidence of substantial conflicts around this time.

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> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago)

I'm assuming you're referring to the Pama-Nyungan family, which predates the dingo by nearly 2000 years?

I can't find any documentation of the Indian language families connection, do you have any?

This reminds me of the Tamil nationalists who, like some Serbs, like to claim that their language is the ur-language.

https://imgur.io/YxC5Rz1

both dingo and the spread of this family are around 5000 years give or take and roughly contemporaneous with this introgression in OP. None of the dates are known with that much precision afaik. It seems the theory that the languages are indian is disputed, so lets just say a lot of new stuff was happening around that time.

There is disputed circumstantial evidence for other waves of migration. For example the Bradshaw paintings have long been thought to be the work of newer peoples (maybe from papua). Some people dispute this and say it discounts the abilities of the natives there, and that may be true, there could be just one group always there who did them and then stopped. But the art bears little resemblance to earlier art there or in other regions of australia, which is often little more than handprints or slightly cartoonish looking things. The bradshaws are quite different and it at least makes sense to ask if there wasnt some new wave of peoples with unique tools and art style. Or otherwise some kind of "golden era" where there was more population and other interesting things happened. Something to look for in future. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings)

you really need to cite some sources for all these claims you're making spread over many different comments

Most of the claims Im making come straight from the nature article at the top. First paragraph:

"Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a new study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants <may?> also have brought more advanced tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo."

The pama-nyungan proto-language has been estimated to be around 5,000 years old, roughly. There are sources for this claim in the wikipedia article, and also for the claim that 306/~400 aborginal languages are in this family. The "out of india" theory is more disputed than I thought (corrected this elsewhere), but is a proposed theory. There are several theories here, but the paper argues for basically what Ive said elsewhere: https://langev.com/pdf/442ac40068c1d8a67a561d0d7f0fcd95c429c...

I talked about the bradshaw paintings somewhere else, the wikipedia article on these has good sources i also have some papers somewhere. Notnsure what else you want to get started.

There's a _lot_ of speculation in there

Theres a lot of speculation around all of this. It is still a source to back up this theory and leads you to others about the archeology. Here is a genetic study from 2016 that disputes the one in this article: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)....

No one really knows until we sequence way more people and more bones.

Sweet, and... Indian language families?

> 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago)

Source? Australia has been continuously populated by Aboriginal people for 60,000+ years, with over 260 languages I find that claim incredibly hard to believe.

It only took 200 years for 200 of those 260 languages to be lost or brought to the edge of extinction. It's at least plausible and to me quite believable that the arrival of a group with a technological advantage 4,000 years ago could have had a substantial impact on the existing languages.

The same set of languages definitely will not have survived for 60,000 years. Tribes come and go, merge and split. Outside influences bring in new words and grammatical structures. Oral tradition is a low fidelity carrier of language and culture, and easily accommodates change in language.

sure it’s plausible, but is there any linguistic evidence of it being the case? otherwise there’s very little point in discussing it

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/14/most-....

Your article doesn't provide any evidence that Pama–Nyungan languages are from India. You'd think the Wikipedia article on Dravidian wouldn't say "The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages" if there was some evidence of the language families relation.

Especially only 4,000 years ago. I’m under the impression that the culture is much much older than that. Why would it change so quickly? Especially for a people’s that are quite traditional. At least as I understand it.

I also understand that the native languages are mostly spoken and not written, are these Indian languages written?

There is compelling but rare evidence of habitation back as far at 60,000 years. But there is zero reason to assume the continent was sealed to migration at any point. In fact it was disconnected and reconnected by land bridges more than once over that period. Culture is a process not an artifact. Regarding the speed of change, tally the vocab contribution of Norman French, Anglo Saxon, Roman and Brittonic languages to modern English -- the 'place' has almost forgotten the contributions made beyond about 1,600 years ago even if there are living residents that are genetically linked to inhabitants from thousands of years before.

Australasia has not been joined to the rest of the world by land bridges for tens of millions of years. That's why so much of the fauna is strange and unusual. Humans are one of the few mammalian species that have managed to cross the deep water barriers on our own.

True, you've never been able to just walk it like you could to Tasmania. I mean millions of years ago, Australia was further south -- it's been inching north[1]. Sea levels around the last glacial maximum[2] made the distances much more 'canue-able'. I would consider that at least 'more connected', but you are correct.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/03/mind-the-gap... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-04-island-hopping-route-people-au...

New Guinea was until end of ice age though I believe.

Various aboriginal cultures (there isnt just one) have elements which are much older but over 300 of the ~400 languages are from one family (pama nyungyan). This family's common ancestor is traced to a region in North Australia around 5000 years ago. These languages suddenly exploded and spread across the continent at around the same time other technologies and techniques seem to change. This was around the time of the Dingo introduction and this considerable Indian introgression discussed in paper--the dingo was probably brought by these people. I may have misremembered that these languages have some relation to south indian ones, it seems this is disputed, but this is all happening around the same time. There is a lot that isn't known about Aboriginal peoples and the genetic studies once they are performed (if allowed) are likely going to show a more complex picture than the usual narrative. To the person who called me a tamil nationalist or something i can only laugh.

Linguistic displacement can occur without genetic displacement. This has happened many times in history -- usually when a society's elite are displaced by a linguistically distinct foreign elite and their language is gradually adopted down the ranks of society as people seek advancement. Many branches of Proto-Indo-European (eg. Anatolian) are thought to have spread in this manner ie. with elite but not whole-population displacement.

I wasn't aware of this Australian language family example, but it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first.

That happened in England after the Battle of Hastings. Upper crust English is still dominated by french words.

My Germanic Linguistics grad school prof told us once, to your point, if you count etymologies of words in spoken English and in the English dictionary, you'd get roughly the following: spoken English uses roughly 80% Germanic vocabulary, but the English dictionary is roughly 80% Latin and Greek words (anglicized).

I've heard it put more crassly as "barbarian grammar with french nouns"

The only thing that got hacked to pieces more than the English peasantry during the middle ages was the English language.

That's great.

This is true but is also something there would be reason to doubt in Australian context. It seems more likely that peoples in northern australia had some contact with outsiders around the time discussed in article, got some technological advances and small degree of genetic mixing from absorbing the outsiders, and then spread out, probably helped by some new techniques. But this is just one conjecture.

I have no idea if its true or not, but it doesn't sound totally impossible. Look at how the language make up has changed over the last 300 years in north america.

> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families

Have you got a source for that?

80% of Australian languages are classified as Pama–Nyungan languages. Are you saying they are based off of an Indo-European language?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pama%E2%80%93Nyungan_languages

dravidian languages are not indo-european

The entire country of India doesn't speak only Dravidian languages. You can understand where the confusion comes from right? The person I was replying too didn't say Dravidian, it says Indian languages.

Sorry for my tone, I didn’t mean to come off as rude. It’s understandable why one would be confused here.

Dravidian is not indo-european AFAIK.

But no one said Dravidian. Thank you for clearing that up.

Same question: Are you saying they are based off of a Dravidian language?

I was saying this based on what Ive read previously. It seems the theory is more disputed than I remember but it is consistent with this genetic introgression and other things happening at the time. Whatever the case a lot of things changed circa 5000 years ago.

> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families

This is wrong. No known relationships exist between any Australian Aboriginal language and any language from India. For much of far northern Australia, no known relationships exist between even neighbouring languages! (The non Pama-Nyungan languages, to be specific.)

> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families

Nonsense.

He is correct.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0489-3

The abstract of that article does nothing to support the claim that any Australian languages are originally from India.

You're right! The only sentence about India:

>An expansion [ of the family from the Gulf of Carpentaria] at this time is consistent with evidence from early genetic studies for gene flow into Australia from India ~4–5 ka21, but more recent work has called these findings into question

It doesn't talk about Indian languages specifically. The Gulf of Carpentaria is on the Australian side of the gulf between Australia and Indonesia.

it seems the theory is more disputed than i remember, so lets say around 5000 years ago there was perhaps significant indian introgression into aborginal genetics (as per article above), the introduction of new tools, the arrival of the dingo (speculated by some to be introduced by these indian peoples) and the spread of this language family from a small progenitor language to the dominant language on the continent. So something significant was happening at that time. There are other hints there couldve been previous waves of new peoples from art and so on (these are disputed, from memory). The story of the aboriginals will wind up being more complex and interesting than "showed up 60,000 years ago and were unchanged until the first fleet".

> and the spread of this language family from a small progenitor language to the dominant language on the continent

I was with you up until this point. Do you have a source for this?

Well it is dominant in that >300/~400 languages are bow in this family. This paper argues for a mid-holocene origin from a proto language around the time we are discussing, and also mentions some other theories w sources (https://langev.com/pdf/442ac40068c1d8a67a561d0d7f0fcd95c429c...)

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