Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley

Author:Matt Ridley [Ridley, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Science, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780060894085
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 1998-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

CHROMOSOME 13

Pre-History

Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi (Ancient times were the youth of the world)

Francis Bacon

The surprising similarity of embryological genes in worms, flies, chicks and people sings an eloquent song of common descent. The reason we know of this similarity is because DN A is a code written in a simple alphabet - a language. We compare the vocabulary of developmental genes and find the same words. On a completely different scale, but with direct analogy, the same is true of human language: by comparing the vocabularies of human languages, we can deduce their common ancestry. Italian, French, Spanish and Romanian share word roots from Latin, for instance. These two processes — linguistic philology and genetic phylogeny — are converging upon a common theme: the history of human migrations. Historians may lament the lack of written records to document the distant, prehistoric past, but there is a written record, in the genes, and a spoken one, too, in the very vocabulary of human language. For reasons that will slowly emerge, chromosome 13 is a good place to discuss the genetics of genealogy.

In 1786 Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta, announced to a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society that his studies of the archaic Indian language Sanskrit had led him to conclude that it was a cousin of Latin and Greek. Being a learned fellow he also thought he saw similarities between these three languages and Celtic, Gothic and Persian. They had all, he suggested, ‘sprung from some common source’. His reasoning was exactly the same as the reasoning which led modern geneticists to propose the existence of the Roundish Flat Worm of 530 million years ago: similarities of vocabulary. For instance, the word for three is ‘tres’ in Latin, ‘treis’ in Greek and ‘tryas’ in Sanskrit. Of course, the great difference between spoken languages and genetic languages is that there is much more horizontal borrowing of words in spoken language. Perhaps the word for three had somehow been inserted into Sanskrit from a western tongue. But subsequent research has confirmed that Jones was absolutely right and that there was once a single people, speaking a single language in a single place and that descendants of those people brought that language to lands as far apart as Ireland and India, where it gradually diverged into modern tongues.

We can even learn something about these people. The Indo-Europeans, as they are known, expanded at least 8,000 years ago from their homeland, which some think was in the modern Ukraine, but was more likely in a hilly part of modern Turkey (the language had words for hills and fast-flowing streams). Whichever is correct, the people were undoubtedly farmers — their language also had words for crops, cows, sheep and dogs. Since this dates them to soon after the very invention of agriculture in the so-called fertile crescent of Syria and Mesopotamia, we can easily picture that their immense success in stamping their mother tongue on two continents was due to their agricultural technology.

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