Coevolution of Genes and Languages Revisited

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 89; no. 12; pp. 5620 - 5624
• Main Authors: Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Minch, Eric, Mountain, J. L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 15.06.1992; National Acad Sciences; National Academy of Sciences
• Subjects: Animals; Biological and medical sciences; Biological Evolution; Coevolution; Continental Population Groups; Datasets; Ethnic Groups; Ethnolinguistics; Evolution; Evolutionary genetics; Evolutionary linguistics; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Genes; Genetics; Genetics of eukaryotes. Biological and molecular evolution; Hominidae; Human genetics; Humans; Language; Languages; Linguistics; man; Models, Genetic; Population genetics; Human; Statistical test; Statistical analysis; Gene; Language; Biological evolution; Linguistics; Phylogeny; Coevolution; Population genetics
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.89.12.5620

In an earlier paper it was shown that linguistic families of languages spoken by a set of 38 populations associate rather strongly with an evolutionary tree of the same populations derived from genetic data. While the correlation was clearly high, there was no evaluation of statistical significance; no such test was available at the time. This gap has now been filled by adapting to this aim a procedure based on the consistency index, and the level of significance is found to be much stronger than 10-3. Possible reasons for coevolution of strictly genetic characters and the strictly cultural linguistic system are discussed briefly. Results of this global analysis are compared with those obtained in independent local analyses.