Welcome to the Western Original Sin & Fare Thee Well in Hell

mtDNA PHYLOTREE and LANGUAGE PHYLOGENY
James B. HARROD
“TOTALLY MISGUIDED”
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
The following article is a review of the seminal publication of James B. Harrod, Director of the
Center for Research on the Origins of Art and Religion, in MOTHER TONGUE, Journal of the Association
for the Study of Language in Prehistory • Issue XIX • 2014, republished on Academia.edu in June 2022
(https://www.academia.edu/22442796/The_200_000_Year_Evolution_of_Homo_sapiens_sapie
ns_Language_and_Myth_Families_based_on_the_mtDNA_Phylotree_Fossil_mtDNA_and_Arc
haeology_A_Thought_Experiment_2014_)
and on Researchgate.net
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296058918_The_200000-
Year_Evolution_of_Homo_sapiens_sapiens_Language_and_Myth_Families_based_on_the_mt
DNA_Phylotree_Fossil_mtDNA_and_Archaeology_A_Thought_Experiment_2014).
The 200,000-Year Evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens
Language and Myth Families based on the mtDNA
Phylotree, Fossil mtDNA and Archaeology: A Thought Experiment
James Harrod’s Abstract. A meta-pattern-analysis of the mitochondrial DNA
phylotree and current distribution of language families indicates that over the last 200,000
years there are robust correspondences between mtDNA haplogroups and language
macrofamilies. This study is a thought experiment, a top-down derivation of the Homo
sapiens sapiens (‘Proto-Human’, ‘Proto-World’) language phylotree, which can be tested
against bottom-up prehistoric linguistic reconstructions. It establishes a relative chronology
for dating the emergence and branching of the global array of language macrofamilies. The
language phylotree is crosschecked against archaeological data and fossil mtDNA studies,
which support many of the correlations. Results imply L3M and N dispersed out-of-Africa at
around 80,000 years ago with both Afrasian and Nile-Sudanic languages and mythological
systems. After a 3-to-5000-year pause in SW Asia three Borean language superfamilies
emerged, Borean-N (Dené-Caucasian), Borean-M (Eurasiatic) and Borean-R, the latter
including language families of SW Asia and Europe as well as SE Asia and Sahul.
Alternative short-chronology hypotheses for language evolution, dating of sapiens sapiens
out-of-Africa and a ‘southern route fast track’ from SW Asia to Sahul do not appear
supported by either mtDNA genetics or archaeology. A hypothesis aligning all language
families to the mtDNA phylotree yields a more differentiated and different chronology to the
dyadic out-of-Africa dispersion model proposed in Fleming, Zegura, Harrod, Bengtson &
Keita (2013).
I will follow this publication, but on page 7, he asserts he is “neither a geneticist nor a linguist,”
and yet he tries to reflect on phenomena that are both linguistic and genetic. That’s my first surprise. How
can you speak of the long-term evolution of languages (mind you 200,000 years in the title) from a
phylogenetic point of view if you are not a linguist who can really think in terms of linguistic phylogeny?
In the same way, to deal with mtDNA, and to map languages onto the phylotree of mtDNA haplogroups
would normally require some genetic competence, be it only to simply ask the basic question: If the two
elements compared here and mapped one onto the other, are actually connected, what is the connection
in terms of genetics, and why not dealing with Y-DNA? Would it be because the case of Europe simply
rejects the mapping? In Europe, apart from Saami, Finnish, Estonian, and a limited number of cases in
northern Russia, plus Georgian and most Caucasian languages, apart from Ossetic, and Armenian (this
latter language is not European, meaning in Europe, and it is not Turkic or agglutinative: it is Indo-
European), who are all surviving languages from Old Europeans (the first Homo Sapiens population of

Europe), all of them agglutinative Turkic languages (Hungarian is the result of very recent migration from
Finland and Northern Russia), all other languages, including Armenian, but with the special case of
agglutinative Turkic Basque, are Indo-European, hence the languages brought by New Europeans who
started arriving in Europe around 12,000 BCE. Basque is the surviving language of Old Europeans who
all spoke Turkic agglutinative languages after they regrouped in Southwest Europe during the 10,000-
year peak period of the Ice Age. Old Europeans started arriving in Europe around 50,000 BCE. But the
present-time Y-DNA of Europeans is 75% connected to Old-European DNA and only 25% connected to
New-European DNA. That is an absolute contradiction, and this is a very old discovery that was very
harshly rejected by specialists at first, and finally accepted in the 1970s and 1980s. The main geneticist
behind the discovery was Bryan Sykes (The Seven Daughters of Eve).
But the title itself contains the concept of “Homo Sapiens Sapiens” which is a barbarity for me.
Homo Sapiens became Homo Sapiens from Homo Erectus or Homo Ergaster in Black Africa by becoming
a long-distance fast bipedal runner (the genetic evolution of the foot is well-known) that caused the
selection of many mutations by standard natural selection, and the side effect of these mutations perfectly
adapted to long-distance fast bipedal running is the possibility to produce numerous vowels, and many
consonants thanks to the modification of respiratory and articulatory systems for the proper breathing for
the said long-distance fast bipedal running. And it was all connected, coordinated, and managed by the
Broca area that expanded then and the innervation of the subglottal area that develops then too. That
mutating Hominin took advantage of these mutations, and he invented the rotation of vowels and
consonants that enabled him or her to produce thousands of three-sound items that are syllables, and
then from there, a vast number of items that are attached to the various items discriminated in reality,
thus becoming words and that is the first articulation of human language. As soon as that was reached
or developed, even in a limited way, this mutating Hominin became Homo Sapiens, and there is no need
to double up the second word in this name because what some people call the cultural or symbolic
revolution around 75,000 BCE is a myth since it is at most one step in the evolution that started as soon
as the rotation of vowels and consonants was developed hence just after or simultaneously with the
mutations necessary for long-distance fast bipedal running, hence at least 300,000 years ago: some
human beads were archaeologically found in Morocco recently that were dated that old. We will have to
deal with this fact again because it pushes back our timeline on the evolution of Homo Sapiens far beyond
300,000 BCE (and it proves by the way Yuval Noah Hariri has it all wrong in his Homo Sapiens book, not
to mention the utopian Homo Deus book).
We can now go back to the content of the article beyond the title.
The author does not even try to define what language, articulated language is, what the three
articulations are, and how they are ordered phylogenetically. He does not wonder how many vowels and
consonants human articulated language needs to have to go beyond the calls of monkeys. He never
wonders how Homo Sapiens was able, became able to utter so many vowels and consonants that have
to be joined to be utterable. No consonant can be uttered without a vowel, but Homo Sapiens went a long
way beyond.
Homo Sapiens invented and developed the rotation of consonants and vowels, and this rotation
depends on the number of vowels and consonants. He does not wonder whether Homo Erectus,
Neanderthals, and Denisovans had reached some level of rotation of vowels and consonants. The
question was then to know if these pre-sapiens Hominins had a limited capability to rotate a limited
number of vowels and consonants. The question then is clear, and it concerns all animals. There are two
stages from plain uttering one vowel or one binary syllable to uttering a fully articulated human language,
even if we only speak of the first articulation, that of this very rotation.
a- All animals go through these three levels: sensations from the senses, perceptions that are
the first processing of these sensations by the brain to discriminate patterns, and finally the encoding of
these discriminated patterns in brain machine code for simple memory, and all animals remember
plenty of things. In my gardens, I have some blackbirds who live from the garden. You should see them
picking worms from the earth I have just plowed and daring such collecting hardly more than one meter
away from me. They recognize me of course, they actually talk to me with some calls, and they are not
in the slightest way afraid. They are nearly as tamed as city pigeons, or hardly less.
b- Homo Sapiens, and in a limited way hominins at least from Homo Erectus upward. They
attached the numerous vocal clusters they can produce to the discriminated patterns. Then they

experiment and speculate on these vocal items endowed with a referential meaning in communication
among themselves and they stabilize the referential connections and these items become words and
these words develop into a lexicon. This speculate-experiment process is recursive as many times as
necessary for stabilization. Animals can’t do that because they do not have the means to develop
articulated language, to develop the first articulation of language that will produce root languages. But
Homo Sapiens can and from there they can move to the second articulation, that of categorizing lexical
items as being spatial (the future nouns) or temporal (the future verbs). When this articulation, which
produced isolating languages, is developed enough, Homo Sapiens will move to the third articulation that
will produce, first, agglutinative languages that endow the nouns and verbs with reciprocal marks, making
the verbs carry a functional summary of marks for all the nouns it brings together in each utterance. Then
it will produce synthetic-analytical languages. The evolution at this level of the third articulation will go on
and agreement from nouns to verbs, and vice versa from verbs to nouns, will regress in number
progressively. These languages will be syntactical-analytical. The most synthetical ones are Sanskrit on
the Indo-Aryan side and Sumerian on the Indo-European side. Then the evolution of these languages will
externalize more and more categorization elements and agreement marks as auxiliary, adverbs, articles,
and many other small words accompanying the nouns and the verbs. Note so far none of these languages
have managed to cancel, meaning getting rid of, all these elements. They only externalize them. Even in
the most advanced languages of this vast family agreement rules survive and are very vivacious, even
when some people may say they are feeble and weak. Plural or number marks still exist, gender marks
still exist, case or functional marks still exist, and conjugational (tense, moods, modalization, etc.) still
exist.
An agglutinative language endows the verbs with the possibility to carry marks for all the noun
phrases they connect together. That does not exist with synthetic analytical languages and the main if
not the only agreement rule verbs have then is the agreement in person and number, at times gender
for the third person, and only for the “subject,” the dominant noun phrase as for the verb at the surface
of the utterance. It is becoming a habit to speak of isolatingness for English and some Indo-European
languages. This reveals isolating languages are badly defined and it is not because the main verbal
item in a sentence is no longer modified, at times in some cases only, at times for a few verbs in all
cases, that conjugation has disappeared. It was transferred onto auxiliaries or complex paraphrases to
replace the conjugated forms, the way all Germanic languages have always exteriorized the expression
of the future, but the auxiliaries or periphrastic expressions conserve person, number, tense, mood
marks, and characteristics. This belief that Indo-European languages are becoming isolating
languages, would be similar to seeing a few trees of an unknown species growing on the outskirts of a
forest, and forgetting there is a whole forest of traditional trees behind those few newly developed
characteristics. It is easy to believe five Douglas pine trees are making the full forest of beeches behind
them invisible. The verb “work” as such has many forms: work – works – worked – to work – working
and even old forms still active like wrought(-iron) which are never-and-hard-to-die items. It could have
been replaced by a copycat of the French word with “forged-iron,” but it was not. And the past participle
used as an adjective is common. You can find 445 examples of “wrought” at
https://sentence.yourdictionary.com/wrought, some being very common like “Her days were long but
peaceful, wrought with duty and rest,” "Well-wrought pop music," “This century wrought major changes
in our society,” “The storm wrought havoc in the south.”
Retrospective reconstruction is limited in its time range. The author suggests three ranges:
25,000 years ago, hence 4,000 years before the peak of the Ice Age, that is to say when Homo Sapiens
started regrouping in Europe to keep away from the invasive ice, and they probably did the same in all
continents though little has been done about it, even in the Americas since it has been proved Homo
Sapiens reached Alaska in 25,000 BCE, 6,000 years before the peak, and the site of Mount Verde in
Chile has archaeologically reached a layer going back to the same date and there should be a third layer
deeper, hence older. Then the author suggests 6-10,000 or 8,000 years ago, thus covering the period
8,000-4,000 BCE which does not even include Göbekli Tepe (9,500 BCE) and does not even start at the
beginning of the Holocene period or era that started 11,700 years ago, hence around 8,700 BCE, and we
could doubt this date as being too late since it does not include Göbekli Tepe. He is right though, and
that is why such retrospective reconstruction is to be kept neglected in the project of going back to the
origin of language. In physics they often say that the same retrospective reconstruction leads to the same
phenomenon: they reach a point beyond which they can reconstruct nothing because all the parameters
are at “ZERO” and some physicists start wondering if the Big Bang is not just such a Point-Zero total
backward-blockade. And what’s more, all physicists know that before this Point-Zero Big Bang there was
a tremendous amount of matter that was tremendously densely packed because the Big Bang did not

“create” the matter that started expanding then, if that was the real event. Some other physicists consider
this Big Bang is valid for our universe but other universes did not go through this process. Was this Big
Bang concentration any different from the Black Holes we can today observe everywhere in the universe,
very voracious black holes which can devour in one gulp complete galaxies? But it expands. Right enough,
so is it possible to have a black hole expanding through an explosion?
But the author is right about the retrospective reconstruction of past linguistic states. They reach
a point where nothing is possible and of course, for the people who stick to such a method, it is impossible
to consider, what happened before, language de facto did not exist before this blank point (yes many
historians and other archaeologists do as if this was true, and some may believe it), and the least
conservative dare not even think beyond 75,000 years BCE because they are well obliged to consider
such a date because, at this date, tools, weapons and other symbolical actions or artifacts produced by
symbolical activities are obvious. But what can we do about the Homo Sapiens in Crete dated 160,000
years ago? What do we do with the beads in Morocco dated 300,000 years ago? And Asia has been
exploited so ruthlessly for three centuries that they are just starting to work on their archaeological past
the one that has not been looted, even China which is trying to catch up on the wasted time.
Harry's View: June 2022
South China Morning Post
The Indo-European and Indo-Aryan migration from Iran circa 10,000
BCE, and Pali expansion in Asia after 3rd
Century BCE

There is no symbolical activity without language because symbolical activities are based on the
conceptualizing power and competence of Homo Sapiens, a competence that develops along with the
mind and language and this started as soon as the mutations producing the long-distance fast bipedal
runner had taken place, and that is a very long time before 75,000 years ago. But only a phylogenetic
linguist can imagine such phenomena, and the author admits he is not a linguist at all.
But what I have just said has far-reaching consequences. Since Neanderthals had some stone
weapons and tools, then they must have had some language. The whole question is wrongly set if we
reduce things to language. They must have had some communication, and language is only one tool in
this perspective. Other elements intervene in communication and language is by far, even for humans,
not the only part of their communication, even if in many cases it is the main part. That means
communications had developed in Pre-Sapiens hominins who were able to produce some stone weapons,
but I also think activities that require vast communication and coordination, like hunting and migrating
require some developed communication that may include oral elements. The question is, how much oral
communication did pre-Sapiens hominins have?
The author suggests following the mtDNA arborescence to deduct – when possible – the history
of language. Note he admits that these genes can only go up to 200,000 years ago in the title, but he is
often more modest in the article. Still, it is quite short.
But this mtDNA leads to the next objection that has to do with the method. He tries to identify the
mtDNA haplogroup or groups that are most common in each “linguistic family” he has determined. The

point is that the linguistic families are determined geographically, and we do not know how they are
determined linguistically. I was told yesterday, in a conference, that Pali was an agglutinative language
despite the fact it is an Indo-Aryan language directly connected to Sanskrit. The argument is simple:
agreement rules are supposed to be agglutinative and a language that contains agreement rules then is
agglutinative. The second idea is that agglutinative languages have rich morphological constructions, and
the prefixes, infixes, and suffixes of this rich morphology are considered the same as the really
agglutinative distinctive trait: the fact that the verb carries marks that identify all the nominal elements it
governs functionally in the utterance it is governing. The verb thus carries the summary of the whole
architecture of the particular sentence it is engaged in, in discourse, in real discursive production. Note
that does not make Indo-European or Indo-Aryan languages agglutinative despite the agreement rules
of the verb with its subject in person and number. That’s the last remnant of agglutinative architecture in
languages that are no longer agglutinative, that have evolved from the last wave of the last migration out
of Black Africa an easy 20,000 years after the wave that produced the agglutinative languages. And the
people of this last wave will remain isolated on the Iranian plateau for at least 30,000 years. I will say that
his “concept,” if it is a concept, of linguistic families is wrong because it is not phylogenetically determined
in linguistic terms but only in geographical proximity terms and similitude or similitudes on the surface of
discursive productions. In other words, these families are based essentially on the consciousness of the
speakers. Imagine Ukrainian and Russian that are so close phylogenetically defining themselves as two
different families, with the question and problem of the de-russification of Odessa and Ukraine in general,
and then the protection of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine that had been integrated with their
own families and relatives, close or distant, in Russia from 1920 (maybe even long before) up to 1989
and the early 1990s. Linguistic cleansing is just as dangerous and absurd as ethnic cleansing or religious
cleansing that is vastly practiced in some countries with possible variations from the elimination of the
concerned groups to the simple segregation of them in some kind of reinvented linguistic apartheid, and
the distance to social apartheid is very limited. It might disturb Ukrainians, but Ukrainian is a Slavic
language that is extremely close to Russian, closer for sure than the three main languages of the Baltic
Republic, two being Indo-European and the third one Turkic (of the Finnish branch of agglutinative
languages that arrived in Europe 50,000 years before the Indo-Europeans. Here we are dealing with
nationalism based on language and to avoid it we have to define linguistic families on strict phylogenetic
considerations, which Harrod does not do.
But the author maps his linguistic families onto the map of mtDNA haplogroups and when he finds
some correspondence, he considers the mtDNA map confirms his linguistic families. But many cases do
not work, Europe for example, and then he has to find some reason for these disparities. In Europe, it is
easy to explain these disparities with the arrival of Indo-European migrants from the Middle East, but they
will only represent 25% of the final European Y-DNA, meaning that the Old European Turkic-speaking
populations were by far the majority and thus they mostly shifted to the new Indo-European languages
arriving from Anatolia to Greece, Italy, and the Iberic Peninsula, whereas the other Indo European routes
were either Anatolia and the Danube valley and beyond or through the Caucasus into the vast Eastern
European plains, both right through to the British Island and the Iberic Peninsula, and the latter route
stopping before Turkic-speaking Finland, Saami Land, and Estonia, plus some northern sections of
Russia, or what was going to be Russia after the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. But is there a sound
theory why they stopped and let the Turkic-speaking population on the east coast of the Baltic sea remain
what they were? DNA proves, that in Europe, it was a cultural and economic shift, not a demographic
shift. We have no explanation why this shift was so vast and so quick. We don’t really have any sound
theory on why in the Northern half of Europe the Indo-Europeans split into three main linguistic families,
Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic. On the other hand, the romance languages are all derived from Greek and
Latin along the northern bank of the Mediterranean.
There is a completely alternative possibility. The homogeneous mtDNA areas as for their
haplogroups could be the result of the homogenizing of mtDNA due to the children raising organization
in the collective hands of women, rotating as for the care to all the children, and up to the Magdalenian
at least controlling most of the spiritual and ritual organization of society. Starting with the Magdalenian,
hence the introduction of agriculture and herding, plus the development of basket making and later on,
metal working leading to the bronze age, women kept the control of raising children (remember one
pregnancy and birth every eighteen months, but they lost the ritualistic and spiritual dominance. The
various communities built themselves with their linguistic original specificities, hence the linguistic families,
and the necessary genetic exchanges among all communities, including, for Old Europeans, with the
Neanderthals for Europe, and for the Homo Sapiens arriving in Asia 120,000 BCE, with the Denisovans
for the whole of Asia and twice as much intensive in Southeast Asia, to avoid what all mammals avoid

instinctively, i.e., inbreeding. Note English emphasizes the impregnation of women, and the sexual act
producing children, whereas French would only emphasize the “consanguinité,” i.e., the genetic similarity
between the blood of the male and the female. This demographic organization leads to communities
sharing a common language they develop from the language they arrived with, and the similar
homogenization of mtDNA by organizing breeding basically within the linguistic community that is of
course wider than a simple village, clan, or tribe. The ogham alphabet of old Irish has twenty characters
corresponding to the first sounds of twenty trees that could only be found, all of them, in one zone which
is the Rhine Valley around what is today Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The Celtic people arrived there along
with the Germanic people, but they already had differentiated their language, Celtic on one side and
Germanic on the other side, but the Celts elaborated their writing system in the Germanic territory and
then moved on west and south to Ireland and the Iberic Peninsula. The Germanic tribes also developed
alphabets from the first sound of the names of tools, weapons, and some gods, what they called runes,
and there are several different runic alphabets. The same selective procedure, but different referential
corpus. This twofold linguistic and mtDNA-genetic homogenization covers up a third level, the cultural-
spiritual-ritual level that developed in the linguistic communities based on the languages of each one.
Three elements push homogenization, and we know that mtDNA is a lot more flexible than plain DNA.
And the motivation was all along with the desire to survive, what some called the survival instinct, and
here too there are three levels: the individuals who can only survive as such by procreating, the local
community that can only survive by procreating, and bringing new genes in the local community pool of
genes, and the linguistic-cultural-spiritual-ritual community at large, once again by procreating. And
procreating at their level of life expectancy and death rates of children (miscarriages, infantile death,
children’s diseases and all sort of accidents up to twelve, age when the boys and the girls have to start
procreating to reach something like ten pregnancies, ten births that may bring to full adulthood (hence to
death at 29 years old) at least three, maybe four children. And birth is dramatic for the mothers too with
mothers dying in childbirth.
In other words, James Harrod speaks of a completely dehumanized humanity that is not
considered at any moment in the concrete parameters of their life, and the basic elements like life
expectancy, death rates at various ages, and the need to bring at least three children to full adulthood
(29 years) per adult woman (13 to 29, an average of course, but could women be pregnant and deliver
at 29 and beyond?).
James Harrod confirms the existence of the Southern Arabian Corridor from Djibouti to Ormuz,
but he did not exploit it properly since he never considered the second migration out of Black Africa
around 120,000 BCE. And since he does not consider Black Africa, the first migration out of it becomes
the migration or migratory movements, within Africa, and he misses the tremendous homogeneity of the
languages known as Semitic or Afro-Asiatic, roots languages that came to some existence with the first
migration out of Black Africa starting around at least 300,000 BCE but mainly developing around 250,000
BCE. The corridor we are speaking of will bring the second and third migrations out of Black Africa to
what is today Pakistan with different directions according to the migrations. The first one moved north
and east, met the Denisovans, and then expanded as far as the Indian subcontinent (Tamil and other
isolating languages) and Southeast Asia where the integration of Denisovans was a lot more important
than in the rest of Asia (all Tibeto-Burman and/or Sino-Tibetan isolating and tonal languages). Note
These early arrivers will recuperate from the Denisovans the gene necessary to survive and thrive up in
Tibet and the Himalayas. The third migration out of Black Africa followed the same corridor to this time
what is known as the Middle East where they met for the first time with Neanderthals. The first wave of
this migration in 70-55,000 BCE were speaking agglutinative languages and they spread east around the
Caspian Sea up in Central Asia to Siberia and the Urals, and beyond to Finland and Saami land, and
they also spread through the Caucasus and Anatolia to the whole of Europe (these routes west will be
used in due time by the Indo-Europeans). The last wave of this migration arrived in Iran (circa 40,000
BCE) and stayed there. This clearly shows 75-70,000 BCE and the symbolic revolution advocated by
some is only considering the third and last migration out of Black Africa and for Harrod only the first wave.
But Homo Sapiens had been evolving all along from at least 300,000 BCE and it is this evolution that
produced in Black Africa the people who migrated starting around 75,000 BCE. This twofold migration
covers the period from 75,000 BCE to 40,000 BCE.
This 75,000 BCE date is a turning point but not a turning point producing Homo Sapiens, or even
Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which is an unjustified conceptual invention. It is the beginning of the end of the
migrations out of Black Africa. And when we reach the Magdalenian and further millennia leading to the

emergence of the empires around the Mediterranean and down the Nile, plus later on, in the Middle East
itself, Black Africans will not migrate anymore, but they will be the victims of some slave trade that made
them slaves in those big empires. I haven’t seen so far, a fair explanation about this shift in history which
is nothing but proto-racism.
What I have just said about these migrations shows that James Harrod cannot have any
phylogenetic knowledge. That’s why he only considers the linguistic communities that exist in the modern
world, and he uses his mapping of these communities onto the mtDNA haplogroup map to imagine some
time depth in the history of these modern languages. Like so many, he does not know the phylogenetic
families of languages: Root languages, isolating languages, agglutinative languages, and synthetic-
analytical languages. He spends a lot of time on click languages in Africa, but apart from the existence
of a few marginalized clicks in other languages, clicks, who are like a compact consonant-vowel merged
sound, hence could be seen as anterior to the differentiation of vowels and consonants, these click
languages are extremely limited in geographical space and they are the proof of the linguistic
homogenization of these communities around their languages, and then this homogenization implies the
same genetic homogenization. The two go together with the linguistic-cultural-spiritual-ritual (shamanic if
you want) homogenization: the rites of circumcision in these communities are extremely important as a
unifying practice of the males of the community. And we must not forget clicks are present in all languages,
even if they are not articulatable sounds per se and are only used as signals or calls, like those used to
call chickens for evening feeding or those used with other animals. At times, a click single or double
sound in class is by far enough to tell a student he has to correct something in what he or she has just
said. Maybe no longer linguistic, but definitely significant.
How can we get rid of “minority” « races »
Maps of Borean and Eurasiatic languages
Those
maps have
nothing to
do with
linguistic
phylogeny
but
everything
to do with
six
centuries of
colonialism

Chart page 10 clearly shows the limits of this work. First of all, it clearly shows the first migration
out of Black Africa down the Nile River and valley into North Africa and the Sahara, though it dates it too
late. It started long before 190,000 years ago, though he has a point in the fact that this migration went
on after it started, showing then that the language in which it established its geographical area was a
homogenizing request for newcomers to be integrated and accepted. But the point is this chart totally
ignores the second migration out of Black Africa, the migration that produced isolating languages in Asia,
the whole of Asia, and before anyone else, meaning these people 120,000 BCE were the only ones to
meet, mix, and even integrate with Denisovans. The chart clearly identifies the third migration out of Black
Africa as “Borean”, but it does not consider the two waves of it and yet only considers the Turkic wave
since it does not go beyond 25,000 years ago, hence beyond the Ice Age Peak. In the Late Borean
(25,000 years ago) we can see three mentions of IE we could identify as Indo-European, but by that date,
the “Indo-European” community that was to produce both Indo-European and Indo-Aryan languages,
existed on the Iranian plateau, but the languages, both Indo-European and Indo-Aryan, had not yet
started migrating, meaning the people who were going to spread them had not started moving. They will
only start migrating around 12,000 BCE, 11,000 years later.
I should here make a note on “Borean.” It is a strange invention.
“Borean (also Boreal or Boralean) is a hypothetical linguistic macrofamily that
encompasses almost all language families worldwide except those native to sub-Saharan Africa,
New Guinea, Australia, and the Andaman Islands. Its supporters propose that the various
languages spoken in Eurasia and adjacent regions have a genealogical relationship, and
ultimately descend from languages spoken during the Upper Paleolithic in the millennia following
the Last Glacial Maximum. The name Borean is based on the Greek βορέας and means "northern".
This reflects the fact that the group is held to include most language families native to the northern
hemisphere. Two distinct models of Borean exist: that of Harold C. Fleming and that of Sergei
Starostin.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borean_languages )
This approach is all-inclusive or nearly. Joseph Greenberg proved a long time ago, linguistically,
that all languages have only one source in Black Africa. But we are speaking of the origin of language,
not this artificial date chosen in many ways arbitrarily just before the Ice Age Peak and after, at least
25,000 years after the last Homo Sapiens left Black Africa: the old genetic fact that all Homo Sapiens
share Neanderthals genes except the Blacks in Sub Saharan Africa. That is only true if we assimilate
Neanderthal genes and Denisovans genes as being the same, which is absurd, but that enables the
thinker to marginalize Asia. So, we are altogether concentrated on the good old white Europeans we can
call Caucasians to sound Eurasian. It sounds as if before this artificial date, Homo Sapiens did not speak
languages. And it puts in the same bag root languages (Arabic and Hebrew for example), isolating
languages (Chinese and Japanese for example), agglutinative languages (Turkish and Hungarian for
example), and synthetical-analytical languages like (French and Pāli for example). If I send my son to the
market with the money and the instruction to buy five kilos of vegetables, when he comes back if I ask:
“So, what have you bought?” and he answers me “Five kilos of vegetables, as you ordered” that will not
be very informative as for what kind of vegetables he actually bought, even if they are all of the same
generic order known as vegetables. “Where did you sit during the concert at the Albert Hall?” “On a seat.”
Not very informative about “where this seat might have been, especially if it was a Promenade Concert.”
For these researchers, the only migrations they consider are the migrations of people after they had all
left Black Africa and were somewhere else in the world. That has no depth, and it proves nothing about
the real phylogeny of language. James B. Harrod is thus the victim of an intellectual reference that is
highly ideological because it excludes the Black Africans who are doomed and locked up in their Sub-
Saharan jungle. It is amazing how some Europeans are constantly inventing theories that expel the
fundamental truth: We humans all came from Black Africa: Blacker than I, you are reborn!
If we consider the chart on page 31, “Table 5. Hypothetical Correlation of L3 Subclades in Current
Population samples to Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic Language Families with TMRCA-based Emergence
Dates,” that states and positions the various Semitic languages in North Africa and Egypt mainly, their
origin, what he calls TMRCA-based emergence dates (Maximum possible ~65ka) is at least 200,000
years too late. His method cannot bring him to 300,000 BCE. And his reference to TMRCA is clear in this
limiting perspective: “Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor.” 65,000 years ago (63,000 BCE) is, in
fact, 10,000 years after the first wave of the Turkic migration to Central Asia and Europe via the Middle
East. And this ambiguity (in fact this exclusion of the next wave of this third migration out of Black Africa,

hence Indo-European and Indo-Aryan languages that could be tentatively called “Iranian” languages as
long as they haven’t moved east or west) is amplified on page 42 when he considers the “Speakers of
Eurasiatic Macrofamily.” He once again works on the present population and he brings together, in the
same linguistic Eurasiatic macrofamily, languages of the Turkic agglutinative type, like those of Central
Asia, the Caucasus, Siberia, the Urals, and a whole set of Asian languages part of the Tibeto-Burman or
Sino-Tibetan isolating family, and languages that developed from these by merging or integrating other
linguistic elements, and we must keep in mind we do not know the linguistic level of development of the
Denisovans who were rather widely integrated into the isolating linguistic communities of Southeast Asia
to the point their genes represent more than 6% of the genetic heritage of these populations. Since he
does not take into account the child-raising organization of these communities, he cannot even envisage
such merging and integrating linguistic and community practices that will eventually go along with the
merging and integrating of mtDNA, the same way as, or even more than Y-DNA. And this homogenization
is clear when he considers what is Indo-Aryan languages (that he calls I.E., meaning Indo-European).
This population that brought these languages derived from Sanskrit, and older languages we do not know,
had not arrived in India or Pakistan yet, and nevertheless, when he specifies the time range and the
languages concerned, there is a serious discrepancy:
“M → M5 (40±12 ka, SE09; 37.1±14.8 ka, BO12 [my emphasis]) multiple India tribes, e.g.
Dungri Bhil (25%); Andh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh [I.E.] (18%); Kamar,
Chhattisgarh [Dravidian] (15%); Nihal [Nihali isolate/I.E.] (8%)” ((PDF) The 200,000-Year
Evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens Language and Myth Families based on the mtDNA Phylotree,
Fossil mtDNA and Archaeology: A Thought Experiment (2014). Available from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296058918_The_200000-
DNA_Phylotree_Fossil_mtDNA_and_Archaeology_A_Thought_Experiment_2014 [accessed
June 12, 2022].)
The time range is all situated before the Ice Age Peak, and the Indo-Aryan migration to the Indian
subcontinent and the southern part of Central Asia will only start after the Ice Age Peak, somewhere
around 12,000 BCE. In this time range, Harrod’s time range, there are no Indo-Aryan, or Indo-European
(his term) populations, only the old isolating-language-speaking population having integrated Denisovan
genetic heritage, and agglutinative-Turkic-language-speaking populations that had spread in Central Asia.
Of course, today you have a vast Indo-Aryan-language-speaking population. His method leads to
confusing considerations with some mixing-up of periods of the past, and the present. And this confusion
goes on in later pages and listings.
In the same way, when considering the Americas, he keeps the concept of Amerind for all native-
American languages. Here is the chart he proposes on page 53, Table 8: ~25 ka (MIS 2) ‘Late
Borean’:
The three lines concerning Amerind languages, first, acknowledge the two waves to North
America, though the dates are wrong. Archaeological evidence has been found in Alaska that goes back

to 25,000 BCE. And in the chart, this Amerind family does not at all concern South America, with the
Mount Verde site that goes back to beyond 30,000 BCE.
It is these sketchy and in many ways very debatable results that should make the method – the
mapping of geographical linguistic maps onto the mapping of mtDNA haplogroup maps dubious, not to
speak of Europe (Old Europeans and New Europeans), and the case of Han in China that has spread
over a vast geographical area though originally the people there spoke different languages of the same
phylogenetic (not Harrod’s approach) linguistic family of Sino-Tibetan isolating languages, but also in
some areas Turkic languages that may still exist like Uyghur or Mongolian, or that might have disappeared
like Turkic languages in most of Europe. To me, it does not seem to prove the rule. The rule, if there is to
be a rule, has to include all cases and an exception of the size of Han is not marginal.
“While the case of Han Chinese might be taken to invalidate my basic hypothesis of a 1:1
correlation of major mtDNA haplogroups and language macrofamilies, I suggest that the
correlation appears to hold in general and this Han Chinese exception appears to be the exception
that proves the rule.” (7) (PDF) The 200,000-Year Evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens, Language
and Myth Families based on the mtDNA Phylotree, Fossil mtDNA and Archaeology: A Thought
Experiment (2014). Available from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296058918_The_200000-
June 12, 2022]
My conclusion is that Too many things are missing for this approach, which is neither linguistic
nor genetic, to be acceptable.
No connection with Homo Sapiens’ physiological mutations in 300,000 BCE resulting from the
development of the species as a long-distance fast bipedal runner. The restructuring of the foot. The
Respiratory system is vastly restructured: very deep larynx among other elements. The articulatory
system is vastly redesigned: mouth, tongue, subglottal and glottal zones. The Broca area coordinates the
running and every part of the body concerned by the activity. The innervation of the subglottal area among
others reinforced. And of course, training for the heart, the breathing, and the dynamic balancing of the
body, that all have to be developed by the activity itself.
No clear consciousness of the phylogeny of language, the three articulations, or the three
migrations out of Black Africa. No clear consideration of the second migration out of Black Africa: isolating
languages of the Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman groups or families.
Little discussion and some assertions are at least tentative, like the one on Amerind, pages 62-
63:
“In any case, out of the Beringia bottleneck’s distal side, mtDNA subclades and
associated language families emerge to disperse occur across North America and along the
coast from North to Central to South America, and thence inland. X2a-mtDNA with the
Algonquian language family appears to have followed the northern North American glacial ice
edge. B-Amerind and D-Amerind appear to have taken the southerly coastal route all the way to
Tierra del Fuego. With respect to the scorpion diagram, I place A2 and C1 in the middle since
A2 (Dené) and C1 are each found across North, Central, and South America, while C1 has the
highest frequencies in populations in Central America. On the ‘back movement’ proximal side of
the Beringia bottleneck, M12’G gives rise to G around 35 ka and G1 around 22 ka, with highest
frequencies in Itelmen and Koryak, speakers of Chukotko-Kamchatkan.” {(7) (PDF) The
200,000-Year Evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens Language and Myth Families based on the
mtDNA Phylotree, Fossil mtDNA and Archaeology: A Thought Experiment (2014). Available
from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296058918_The_200000-
Jun 12 2022].}
He ignores all the archaeological discoveries in South America and Mesoamerica with the
progression from South America to Central America of architecture (pyramids for example), agriculture

(from Peru to the Andes, to Amazonia concerning cotton, all sorts of irrigated goods, cacao, etc.), and
the shift from a commerce-based Peruvian civilization to the very bloody Maize God and maize cultivation
with Olmec, Mayas, and Aztecs. The Peruvians, at least the Incas, had a way to record their experience
with knots on strings, and the Mayas invented the most sophisticated syllabary and phonetic writing
system with an important visual dimension that was representational at first and became symbolic later
on.
For all those reasons, I would advise readers to keep an open critical mind and check most
assertions with phylogenetic considerations, and linguistic and archaeological exploration. When I
contemplate the progress, and the speed of this progress, of the Chinese in their territory, and the
potential of Central Asia, Siberia, and the Southern Indian subcontinent for archaeology, I am very
prudent on some approaches that sound more like tinkering about than sound reflection and research.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Welcome to the Western Original Sin and Fare Thee Well in Hell.

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