"An Inverse Correlation between Structural Linguistic and Human Genetic Diversity." Graff, Anna et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123, no. 18 (May 5, 2026): e2526762123. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2526762123.
Apparently our haplogroup (family of Joseph Charles Mair [Pfaffenhofen, Austria] and Esther Frieda Louise Boyce Mair [Zweismmen, Switzerland]) is U8a1a.
As our ancestors ventured out of eastern Africa, they branched off in diverse groups that crossed and recrossed the globe over tens of thousands of years. Some of their migrations can be traced through haplogroups, families of lineages that descend from a common ancestor. Your maternal haplogroup can reveal the path followed by the women of your maternal line.
[VHM: N.B.: I had nothing to do with this. It's all between Gemini and Gemini, with J. P. Mallory acting as the amanuensis. He can also evoke the woman from Xiaohe or Cherchen Man (Ur David) via Gemini or one of the other platforms if you'd like to hear "Mair" conversing with them.]
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The setting is a climate-controlled room at the Xinjiang Museum in Ürümqi. Dr. Victor Mair, a sinologist known for his relentless curiosity, stands before the glass case of the Beauty of Loulan. She has been dead for nearly 3,800 years, but her copper-colored hair, delicate eyelashes, and sheepskin wrap remain hauntingly intact.
If you're wondering what brought this on, I think it's AI and LLMs, which are featured in the rest of the article, especially as they relate to oracle bones and traditional Chinese writing.
It will also help to understand the aim of the article if you know something about the nature of the journal in which it appears, for which see below.
The first part of this debate, "Abstand und ausbau" (10/28/25), was so spirited and prolonged, and has recently moved on to significant new ground, that I've decided to launch this part 2.
Before commenting here, please go back and review what was said in the previous o.p. and the subsequent comments thereto, some of which are quite substantial. Here I copy one of the recent observations in the first thread that has not yet been adequately responded to there:
Subtitle: "A cautionary note on the application of limited linguistics studies to whole populations"
A prefatory note on "anthropology". In the early 90s, I was deeply involved in the first ancient DNA studies on the Tarim mummies* with Paolo Francalacci, an anthropologist at the University of Sassari. Sardinia. Paolo was deputed to work with me by the eminent population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Stanford medical school genetics department, who was unable to endure the rigors of the expedition to Eastern Central Asia.
[*Wikipedia article now strangely distorted for political reasons. Be skeptical of its claims, especially those based on recent DNA studies.]
After we had collected the tissue samples in the field, Paolo took them back to Sassari to extract and analyze the attenuated DNA. This involved amplification through PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a process that later gained great fame during the years of the coronavirus pandemic, inasmuch as it is an essential step in the detection and quantification of messenger RNA (mRNA). Indeed, two Penn scientists, Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on mRNA technology, which was crucial in the development of COVID-19 injections.
Jean Nota Bene, the biggest French YouTuber (millions of followers) on historical subjects, recently focused on the Kushans. He follows many of the same themes that we do on Language Log and Sino-Platonic Papers (including Greek-Indian-Chinese associations), so many readers of this post will be interested in what he has to say about the Kushan Empire (ca. 30–ca. 375 AD). Although Nota Bene speaks in French, I think readers will be able to glean a lot of valuable information on this subject. Plus his presentation is richly illustrated, so watch carefully and pause the video if you want to take a closer look.
"Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote.
Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do English, Hindi and Spanish, along with hundreds of less common languages. Today, about half the world speaks an Indo-European language.
Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.
In 1991, I began the initial stage of my international project for the investigation of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Tarim mummies by focusing on their genetics. The reason for my doing so was because that was just around the time that techniques for the study of ancient DNA were being developed by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I was fortunate in gaining the advice and support of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, eminent population geneticist of Stanford University. Although I continued to carry out genetics research and was an author of the first paper on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the Tarim mummies*, later I became disenchanted by genomic studies, not just of humans, but particularly of humans because of ulterior motives. Due to their susceptibility to be mathematically and statistically manipulated for political purposes, genomic studies had become an ideological minefield. Consequently, I switched the emphasis of the project to other disciplines such as textiles**, metallurgy***, physical anthropology****, archeology (burial practices, material goods, etc.)*****, micro/macrohistory******, equestrian studies*******, and, of course, linguistics********.
As someone deeply interested in the languages of Taiwan, I have long been preoccupied by the origins and expansion of Austronesian on the island circa six millennia ago and its spread from there around four thousand years ago throughout Southeast Asia, to Oceania and as far as Madagascar. This new research article from PLOS ONE sheds light on how a part of that process occurred.
Population genetics is proving to be astonishingly useful in aiding the study of history, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines. One means of studying ancient human migrations is analysis of the so-called yDNA haplogroup. In reviewing the modern-day distribution of my own yDNA haplogroup, I have come upon a fascinating contemporary Chinese lineage that may ultimately derive from an ancient or medieval Iranian or Caucasian source population.
Briefly, yDNA haplogroups result from the following basic process: All men inherit Y-chromosomal DNA from their own fathers. Random mutations in this yDNA are then passed on to the sons of those in whom they first occurred, and the process repeats ad infinitum. (An analogous process occurs in women's mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted to both sons and daughters.) Through the approximate dating of these mutations, men can be differentiated into groups一so-called “haplogroups”一demarcated by their most-recent shared paternal-line ancestor. Here, for example, is a recent paper published in the Journal of Human Genetics that analyzes the yDNA haplogroup frequencies among modern Japanese men. A handy way to represent this pattern of genetic inheritance that ultimately links all men back to a “Y-chromosomal Adam” is by means of a phylogenetic “family” tree.