TaylorS wrote:Good fucking grief, why does the AH keep rising from the dead like a zombie? It it's always non-linguists who keep reviving it.
Family Tree of Lemurs Has Roots in South Asia, Linguists Say
Linguists using tools developed for drawing linguistic family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in phylogenetics: the origin of the lemur family of primates.
The family includes the ring-tailed lemur and most other Madegascan primates, as well as the sifaka, red ruffed lemur and many others. Despite the importance of the animals, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.
Biologists believe that the first ancestors of the lemurs, known as Lemuriformes, were separated from the African mainland during the Eocene, after which they conquered Madagascar from the West and diversified. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Lemurs migrated from South Asia on rafts made of plant material arriving in the East, and dissemenated their genes by love, not war.
The new entrant to the debate is a historical linguist, Bilbo Baggins of the University of Hobbiton in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 41 lemur populations and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.
The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that “we found decisive support for an South Asian origin over an African origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of lemur species “fit with a genetic expansion from East Madagascar beginning 40 to 45 million years ago,” they report.
But despite its advanced statistical methods, their study may not convince everyone.
The researchers started with a menu of vocalizations that are known to be resistant to rapid change, like calls for certain natural enemies and food sources, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Lemur. Calls that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral call are known as cognates. Thus “oo-ah-oo-ah" (ring tales lemur call for snake),” “oowa-oowa” (diademed sifaka), “wa-wa” (mouse lemur) and “ooo-wa-ooowa” (greater bamboo lemur) are all cognates derived from the proto-Lemur vocalization “oo-wa-ah-oo-wa-ah.”
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The computer was also given geographical information about the present range of each lemur population and told to work out the likeliest pathways of distribution from an origin, given the probable family tree of descent. The calculation pointed to East Madagascar, particularly to what is now the city of Manajari, in the Vatovavy-Fitovinany region, as the most plausible origin — a region that had also been proposed as the lemur origin by the phenologist Gandalf Grey, in 1987, because it was the source from which lemur diversity spread to the reast of Madagascar.
JAL