{"product_id":"examining-the-farming-language-dispersal-hypothesis-9781902937205","title":"Examining the Farming\/Language Dispersal","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLinguistic diversity is one of the most puzzling and  challenging features of humankind. Why are there some six  thousand different languages spoken in the world today? Why are  some, like Chinese or English, spoken by millions over vast  territories, while others are restricted to just a few thousand  speakers in a limited area? The farming\/language dispersal  hypothesis makes the radical and controversial proposal that the  present-day distributions of many of the world's languages and  language families can be traced back to the early developments  and dispersals of farming from the several nuclear areas where  animal and plant domestication emerged. For instance, the  Indo-European and Austronesian language families may owe their  current vast distributions to the spread of food plants and of  farmers (speaking the relevant proto-language) following the  Neolithic revolutions which took place in the Near East and in  Eastern Asia respectively, thousands of years ago. In this  challenging book, international experts in historical  linguistics, prehistoric archaeology, molecular genetics and  human ecology bring their specialisms to bear upon this  intractable problem, using a range of interdisciplinary  approaches. There are signs that a new synthesis between these  fields may now be emerging. This path-breaking volume opens new  perspectives and indicates some of the directions which future  research is likely to follow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart I Introduction. 'The Emerging Synthesis': the Archaeogenetics of Farming\/Language Dispersals and other Spread Zones (Colin Renfrew); Farmers, Foragers, Languages, Genes: the Genesis of Agricultural Societies (Peter Bellwood). Part II Setting the Scene for the Farming\/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. The Expansion Capacity of Early Agricultural Systems: a Comparative Perspective on the Spread of Agriculture (David R Harris); The Economies of Late Pre-farming and Farming Communities and their Relation to the Problem of Dispersals (Mark Nathan Cohen); What Drives Linguistic Diversification and Language Spread? (Lyle Campbell); Inference of Neolithic Population Histories using Y-chromosome Haplotypes (Peter A Underhill); Demic Diffusion as the Basic Process of Human Expansions (Luca Cavalli-Sforza); The DNA Chronology of Prehistoric Human Dispersals (Peter Forster \u0026amp; Colin Renfrew); What Molecules Can't Tell Us about the Spread of Languages and the Neolithic (Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt, Vincent Macaulay \u0026amp; Martin Richards). Part III Regional Studies. A. Western Asia and North Africa. The Natufian Culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and Economic Trends in Southwestern Asia (Ofer Bar-Yosef); Archaeology and Linguistic Diversity in North Africa (Fekri A Hassan); The Prehistory of a Dispersal: the Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) Farming Lexicon (Alexander Militarev); Transitions to Farming and Pastoralism in North Africa (Graeme Barker); Language Family Expansions: Broadening our Understandings of Cause from an African Perspective (Christopher Ehret); Language and Farming Dispersals in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Particular Reference to the Bantu-speaking Peoples (David W Phillipson). B. Asia and Oceania. An Agricultural Perspective on Dravidian Historical Linguistics: Archaeological Crop Packages, Livestock and Dravidian Crop Vocabulary (Dorian Fuller); The Genetics of Language and Farming Spread in India (Toomas Kivisild et al); Languages and Farming Dispersals: Austroasiatic Languages and Rice Cultivation (Charles Higham); Tibeto-Burman Phylogeny and Prehistory: Languages, Material Culture and Genes (George van Driem); The Austronesian Dispersal: Languages, Technologies and People (Andrew Pawley); Island Southeast Asia: Spread or Friction Zone? (Victor Paz); Polynesians: Devolved Taiwanese Rice Farmers or Wallacean Maritime Traders with Fishing, Foraging and Horticultural Skills? (Stephen Oppenheimer \u0026amp; Martin Richards); Can the Hypothesis of Language\/Agriculture Co-dispersal be Tested with Archaeogenetics? (Matthew Hurles); Agriculture and Language Change in the Japanese Islands (Mark Hudson). C. Mesoamerica and the US Southwest. Contextualizing Proto-languages, Homelands and Distant Genetic Relationship: Some Reflections on the Comparative Method from a Mesoamerican Perspective (Ssren Wichmann); 26 Proto-Uto-Aztecan Cultivation and the Northern Devolution (Jane H Hill); The Spread of Maize Agriculture in the U.S. Southwest (R G Matson); Conflict and Language Dispersal: Issues and a New World Example (Steven A LeBlanc). D. Europe. Issues of Scale and Symbiosis: Unpicking the Agricultural 'Package' (Martin Jones); Demography and Dispersal of Early Farming Populations at the MesolithicNeolithic Transition: Linguistic and Genetic Implications (Marek Zvelebil); Pioneer Farmers: The Neolithic Transition in Western Europe (Chris Scarre); Farming Dispersal in Europe and the Spread of the Indo-European Language Family (Bernard Comrie); DNA Variation in Europe: Estimating the Demographic Impact of Neolithic Dispersals (Guido Barbujani \u0026amp; Isabelle Dupanloup); Admixture and the Demic Diffusion Model in Europe (Lounes Chikhi); Complex Signals for Population Expansions in Europe and Beyond (Kristiina Tambets et al); Analyzing Genetic Data in a Model-based Framework: Inferences about European Prehistory (Martin Richards, Vincent Macaulay \u0026amp; Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt). Postscript. Concluding Observations (Peter Bellwood \u0026amp; Colin Renfrew).","brand":"McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51043135095127,"sku":"9781902937205","price":45.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781902937205.jpg?v=1750957140","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/examining-the-farming-language-dispersal-hypothesis-9781902937205","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}