Science Tuesday - Dogs, A New Language, and Hobbits
D.N.A. Backs Lore on Pre-Columbian Dogs
By JACK HITT, The New York Times, July 15, 2013
BISHOPVILLE, S.C. - Inside a fenced acre on the swampy Lynches River flood plain in central South Carolina, seven of Don Anderson’s primitive dogs spring into high alert at approaching strangers. Medium-sized, they fan out amid his junkyard of improvised habitat: a few large barrels to dig under, an abandoned camper shell from a pickup, segments of black plastic water pipe and backhoed dirt mounds overgrown with waist-high ragweed.
These are Carolina dogs, and though they are friendly, one can instantly sense they are different from other dogs. Several rush to the gate, their whole bodies wagging eagerly. Others sprint off and take position - their jackal ears fully erect, their fishhook tails twitching like flags in a stiff wind. A black pup scrabbles away in crablike submission that eventually takes her into an underground den, dug deep enough that she is not seen again.
Walking into the pen is dangerous for only one reason: one of the dogs’ defining habits is digging snout pits, or gallon-size holes in the ground, perhaps to root for grubs or munch the soil for nutrients.
“It’s like a lunar landscape,” Mr. Anderson warns as we tread carefully into the underbrush.
Some Carolina dogs still live in the wild, and local people have long thought they were one of the few breeds that predated the European arrival in the Americas: “Our native dog,” as Michael Ruano, another enthusiast who often works with Mr. Anderson, put it. “America’s natural dog.”
Now, a new study of canine DNA backs up the folklore. A team led by Peter Savolainen at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has reported that several dog breeds in the Americas - among them the Peruvian hairless, the Chihuahua and the Carolina dog - are without some genetic markers indicative of European origin, suggesting they arrived in an earlier migration from Asia.
The study also reawakens the long debate about where and how dogs were domesticated. Current theory speculates that they are descended from wolves that somehow became attached to humans perhaps 12,000 to 33,000 years ago - an early amity that has an extensive pedigree in human folklore. (Think Romulus and Remus.)
But where that may have happened is not entirely settled. Some say the earliest dogs emerged in the Middle East. Others point to an area south of the Yangtze River in China. Dr. Savolainen’s study provides more evidence for the China hypothesis and, as a result, lends support to the idea that the earliest domesticated dogs crossed the Ice Age land bridge known as Beringia some 12,000 years ago.
Carolina dogs, then, could be camp followers that wandered off from their Paleo-Indian masters and took up residence in swampy areas where they can easily hide out from their own natural predators.
Encounter With a Puppy
Mr. Anderson, 79, is a Virginian who moved to South Carolina in 1961. He’s a garrulous man dressed in comfortable blue stretch pants, a pair of Crocs on his feet, and a headband to hold back shoulder-length hair that stubbornly retains some glints of blond.
He remembers the day, back in the Nixon administration, when he had his first encounter with these wild dogs. Down by a nearby water hole on his land, he spied a mother and three pups, and they immediately bolted.
“Two of the puppies went east, and one puppy tried to get out west and he got stuck,” he explained. He took the pup home and named him Tadpole.
Not long afterward a stranger saw the dog and offered Mr. Anderson $300 for what his neighbors called a “Lynches River wild dog.” He refused the deal, thinking, he says now, “if he’s worth $300 to you, then he’s worth $300 to me.”
Mr. Anderson soon learned that others called them Carolina dogs, a name given to them by I. Lehr Brisbin, a biologist with the Savannah River nuclear power plant, near Aiken, and the man most responsible for the current interest in the breed. In the early 1970s, Dr. Brisbin was employed checking out the wildlife on the periphery of the plant and often came upon these wild dogs in the swampier parts of his domain. He took a few in and today maintains an 18-acre enclosure where he has his own pack.
Dr. Brisbin got the Carolina dog recognized by the United Kennel Club and was the first to describe some of the breed’s rare traits, including the fishhook tail, the pointed, somewhat lupine face and the habit of digging snout pits. The dogs cooperate as a pack when they hunt a field mouse or a rabbit, possibly using their white hindquarters as signals.
“That white fishhook can be hoisted like a white-tailed deer’s and can flash back and forth,” Dr. Brisbin explained. “I saw them do it, and I saw the rest of the pack honor it.”
Carolina dogs typically go into heat once a year, like wolves, instead of twice, like domesticated dogs. They cover up their scat by pushing dirt over it with their noses, not by using their hindquarters to scratch the ground.
Still, determining just what is and is not a Carolina dog requires a kind of gut instinct. To Mr. Anderson, it’s a matter of “I know it when I see it”; Dr. Brisbin is more blunt.
“The Carolina dog is a breed created by Brisbin,” he said, referring to himself in the third person, “by picking dogs he likes, the type that he thinks typify the ancient dog.”
This is not to say the Carolina dog is more mythic than real. But the problem is that some of the wilder dogs have mated with other breeds - local dogs and even coyotes. Determining just what is a Carolina dog means becoming more finely tuned to the sense that anyone feels stepping into Don Anderson’s enclosed acre. Experiential knowledge is crucial, being able to sense the entirety of the animal and in that way recognize which dog is almost purely Carolina and which is more of a mix.
Most Carolina dogs are ginger-colored, like Australian dingoes, but they can also be black and piebald. Most, but not all, are short-haired.
Some have tiny patches, right above their distinctive almond eyes, that look like a spare set of eyes, what Mr. Anderson calls “spirit eyes.” Some have an unusual white stripe at the shoulder. There are the noticeable ears and the tail, but also the athletic tucked-in stomach (like a Doberman). DNA studies may soon make it easier to assert the Carolina’s distinctions from other dogs.
Early Sightings
Awareness of this unusual dog has its own history. According to Mark Eden, another enthusiast working with Mr. Anderson, the journals of the 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto include possible references to Carolina dogs.
In the essential narrative of early American natural history, William Bartram’s 1791 book “Bartram’s Travels,” the author runs across a Seminole Indian maintaining some horses and writes: “One occurrence, remarkable here, was a troop of horse under the control and care of a single black dog, which seemed to differ in no respect from the wolf of Florida, except his being able to bark as the common dog.”
In his journal for Feb. 16, 1806, Meriwether Lewis writes of an “Indian dog” that is “party coloured; black white brown and brindle” with “ears erect and pointed like those of the wolf” and used by American Indians to hunt elk.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dog’s wildness and its ginger coat - and probably its use by the poor as a hunting dog - led to the name “yaller dog,” typically spelled that way except by the kind of manor-born people who say “chitterlings.”
And that may have given rise to the term “yellow dog Democrat” to describe the anti-Republican die-hard in the South, as in the 1920s slogan “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket.”
The occasional revival of interest in the Carolina dog happens this time just as enthusiasts make the case for its inclusion among the ancient dogs the world over. Dr. Brisbin also suggests that the Carolina dog fits in the niche of “pariah dogs,” dingo-like and appearing to survive in difficult habitats, like Don Anderson’s swamps, typically on the outskirts of ancient human migration routes.
There are many of these older dogs: the Canaan dog of Israel, the Santal hound of India, the Jindo of Korea, the Telomian of Malaysia, the New Guinea singing dog, the Kintamani dog of Bali, the African basenji - and the images that pop up in a Web search are oddly similar to those of the Carolina dog.
Continents and millenniums aside, they possess many of the qualities Dr. Brisbin and Mr. Anderson describe. These primitive dogs started living near people tens of thousands of years ago, finding a place just out of sight of human encampments - where, if the current studies hold up, they steadfastly remain.
A Village Invents a Language All Its Own
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, July 14, 2013
There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children living in a remote village in northern Australia.
Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan, has been studying the young people’s speech for more than a decade and has concluded that they speak neither a dialect nor the mixture of languages called a creole, but a new language with unique grammatical rules.
The language, called Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, is spoken only by people under 35 in Lajamanu, an isolated village of about 700 people in Australia’s Northern Territory. In all, about 350 people speak the language as their native tongue. Dr. O’Shannessy has published several studies of Light Warlpiri, the most recent in the June issue of Language.
“Many of the first speakers of this language are still alive,” said Mary Laughren, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not involved in the studies. One reason Dr. O’Shannessy’s research is so significant, she said, “is that she has been able to record and document a ‘new’ language in the very early period of its existence.”
Everyone in Lajamanu also speaks “strong” Warlpiri, an aboriginal language unrelated to English and shared with about 4,000 people in several Australian villages. Many also speak Kriol, an English-based creole developed in the late 19th century and widely spoken in northern Australia among aboriginal people of many different native languages.
Lajamanu parents are happy to have their children learn English for use in the wider world, but eager to preserve Warlpiri as the language of their culture.
Lajamanu’s isolation may have something to do with the creation of a new way of speaking. The village is about 550 miles south of Darwin, and the nearest commercial center is Katherine, about 340 miles north. There are no completely paved roads.
An airplane, one of seven owned by Lajamanu Air, a community-managed airline, lands on the village’s dirt airstrip twice a week carrying mail from Katherine, and once a week a truck brings food and supplies sold in the village’s only store. A diesel generator and a solar energy plant supply electricity.
The village was established by the Australian government in 1948, without the consent of the people who would inhabit it. The native affairs branch of the federal government, concerned about overcrowding and drought in Yuendumu, forcibly removed 550 people from there to what would become Lajamanu. At least twice, the group walked all the way back to Yuendumu, only to be retransported when they arrived.
Contact with English is quite recent. “These people were hunters and gatherers, roaming over a territory,” said Dr. O’Shannessy. “But then along came white people, cattle stations, mines, and so on. People were kind of forced to stop hunting and gathering.”
By the 1970s, villagers had resigned themselves to their new home, and the Lajamanu Council had been set up as a self-governing community authority, the first in the Northern Territory. In the 2006 census, almost half the population was under 20, and the Australian government estimates that by 2026 the number of indigenous people 15 to 64 will increase to 650 from about 440 today.
Dr. O’Shannessy, who started investigating the language in 2002, spends three to eight weeks a year in Lajamanu. She speaks and understands both Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, but is not fluent.
People in Lajamanu often engage in what linguists call code-switching, mixing languages together or changing from one to another as they speak. And many words in Light Warlpiri are derived from English or Kriol.
But Light Warlpiri is not simply a combination of words from different languages. Peter Bakker, an associate professor of linguistics at Aarhus University in Denmark who has published widely on language development, says Light Warlpiri cannot be a pidgin, because a pidgin has no native speakers. Nor can it be a creole, because a creole is a new language that combines two separate tongues.
“These young people have developed something entirely new,” he said. “Light Warlpiri is clearly a mother tongue.”
Dr. O’Shannessy offers this example, spoken by a 4-year-old: Nganimpa-ng gen wi-m si-m worm mai aus-ria. (We also saw worms at my house.)
It is easy enough to see several nouns derived from English. But the -ria ending on “aus” (house) means “in” or “at,” and it comes from Warlpiri. The -m ending on the verb “si” (see) indicates that the event is either happening now or has already happened, a “present or past but not future” tense that does not exist in English or Warlpiri. This is a way of talking so different from either Walpiri or Kriol that it constitutes a new language.
The development of the language, Dr. O’Shannessy says, was a two-step process. It began with parents using baby talk with their children in a combination of the three languages. But then the children took that language as their native tongue by adding radical innovations to the syntax, especially in the use of verb structures, that are not present in any of the source languages.
Why a new language developed at this time and in this place is not entirely clear. It was not a case of people needing to communicate when they have no common language, a situation that can give rise to pidgin or creole.
Dr. Bakker says that new languages are discovered from time to time, but until now no one has been there at the beginning to see a language develop from children’s speech.
Dr. O’Shannessy suggests that subtle forces may be at work. “I think that identity plays a role,” she said. “After children created the new system, it has since become a marker of their identity as being young Warlpiri from the Lajamanu Community.”
The language is now so well established among young people that there is some question about the survival of strong Warlpiri. “How long the kids will keep multilingualism, I don’t know,” Dr. O’Shannessy said. “The elders would like to preserve Warlpiri, but I’m not sure it will be. Light Warlpiri seems quite robust.”
Hobbits’ Size Not Likely Linked to Growth Disorders
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, July 15, 2013
So much about the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits remains roundly contentious 10 years after their fossils were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. But a new study has weighed in with strong support for the original hypothesis about them: that they were remnants of a previously unknown distinct species of the genus Homo that lived as recently as 17,000 years ago.
Detailed comparisons show that the single skull among the skeletal remains is “clearly distinct” from skulls of healthy modern humans, the study said. Thus the fossil specimen may well deserve its designation as a representative of an extinct species, which scientists have called Homo floresiensis.
Much of the debate has centered on arguments by skeptics that these small-bodied, small-brained hominins were nothing more than modern Homo sapiens who had one of a number of growth disorders, possibly microcephaly, Laron syndrome or endemic hypothyroidism, known as cretinism.
In a paper in the journal PLoS One, the researchers said their findings “counter the hypotheses of pathological conditions.”
The lead author, Karen L. Baab, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University on Long Island, said the findings provided the most precise and comprehensive measurements to date of outer shape - every ridge and groove, every lump and bump - of the H. floresiensis cranium.
These measurements were compared with skulls of extinct fossil hominins, including Homo erectus, Neanderthals and other archaic Homo species, and with skulls of normal modern humans as well as humans that had each of the pathological conditions.
The researchers, who included Kieran P. McNulty of the University of Minnesota and Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany, concluded that the H. floresiensis cranium was more similar to the various fossil hominins than to normal modern humans or those with pathologies. Dr. Baab said in an interview that they “tried to test pretty much every hypothesis” and provide “a much more complete view” of the hobbit cranium shape compared with previous studies.
She said the findings complemented earlier research led by Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University who specializes in brain evolution. They used CT scans to create internal casts showing the shape of the brain from the impression it left on the inner surface of the skull. They concluded that the hobbit was a new species closely related to H. erectus and was not a human that had microcephaly.
The H. floresiensis fossils were found in 2003, buried in sediments in a wide-mouth cave known as Liang Bua. From that name came the LB1 label for the single cranium, which is no bigger than a grapefruit. The size suggests that the brain was less than one-third the size of a human’s. From other skeletal remains of eight individuals, the hobbits stood not much more than three feet tall, walked upright and were anatomically more primitive than H. sapiens.
If only, anthropologists say, they had more than a sample of one skull with which to work.
By JACK HITT, The New York Times, July 15, 2013
BISHOPVILLE, S.C. - Inside a fenced acre on the swampy Lynches River flood plain in central South Carolina, seven of Don Anderson’s primitive dogs spring into high alert at approaching strangers. Medium-sized, they fan out amid his junkyard of improvised habitat: a few large barrels to dig under, an abandoned camper shell from a pickup, segments of black plastic water pipe and backhoed dirt mounds overgrown with waist-high ragweed.
These are Carolina dogs, and though they are friendly, one can instantly sense they are different from other dogs. Several rush to the gate, their whole bodies wagging eagerly. Others sprint off and take position - their jackal ears fully erect, their fishhook tails twitching like flags in a stiff wind. A black pup scrabbles away in crablike submission that eventually takes her into an underground den, dug deep enough that she is not seen again.
Walking into the pen is dangerous for only one reason: one of the dogs’ defining habits is digging snout pits, or gallon-size holes in the ground, perhaps to root for grubs or munch the soil for nutrients.
“It’s like a lunar landscape,” Mr. Anderson warns as we tread carefully into the underbrush.
Some Carolina dogs still live in the wild, and local people have long thought they were one of the few breeds that predated the European arrival in the Americas: “Our native dog,” as Michael Ruano, another enthusiast who often works with Mr. Anderson, put it. “America’s natural dog.”
Now, a new study of canine DNA backs up the folklore. A team led by Peter Savolainen at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has reported that several dog breeds in the Americas - among them the Peruvian hairless, the Chihuahua and the Carolina dog - are without some genetic markers indicative of European origin, suggesting they arrived in an earlier migration from Asia.
The study also reawakens the long debate about where and how dogs were domesticated. Current theory speculates that they are descended from wolves that somehow became attached to humans perhaps 12,000 to 33,000 years ago - an early amity that has an extensive pedigree in human folklore. (Think Romulus and Remus.)
But where that may have happened is not entirely settled. Some say the earliest dogs emerged in the Middle East. Others point to an area south of the Yangtze River in China. Dr. Savolainen’s study provides more evidence for the China hypothesis and, as a result, lends support to the idea that the earliest domesticated dogs crossed the Ice Age land bridge known as Beringia some 12,000 years ago.
Carolina dogs, then, could be camp followers that wandered off from their Paleo-Indian masters and took up residence in swampy areas where they can easily hide out from their own natural predators.
Encounter With a Puppy
Mr. Anderson, 79, is a Virginian who moved to South Carolina in 1961. He’s a garrulous man dressed in comfortable blue stretch pants, a pair of Crocs on his feet, and a headband to hold back shoulder-length hair that stubbornly retains some glints of blond.
He remembers the day, back in the Nixon administration, when he had his first encounter with these wild dogs. Down by a nearby water hole on his land, he spied a mother and three pups, and they immediately bolted.
“Two of the puppies went east, and one puppy tried to get out west and he got stuck,” he explained. He took the pup home and named him Tadpole.
Not long afterward a stranger saw the dog and offered Mr. Anderson $300 for what his neighbors called a “Lynches River wild dog.” He refused the deal, thinking, he says now, “if he’s worth $300 to you, then he’s worth $300 to me.”
Mr. Anderson soon learned that others called them Carolina dogs, a name given to them by I. Lehr Brisbin, a biologist with the Savannah River nuclear power plant, near Aiken, and the man most responsible for the current interest in the breed. In the early 1970s, Dr. Brisbin was employed checking out the wildlife on the periphery of the plant and often came upon these wild dogs in the swampier parts of his domain. He took a few in and today maintains an 18-acre enclosure where he has his own pack.
Dr. Brisbin got the Carolina dog recognized by the United Kennel Club and was the first to describe some of the breed’s rare traits, including the fishhook tail, the pointed, somewhat lupine face and the habit of digging snout pits. The dogs cooperate as a pack when they hunt a field mouse or a rabbit, possibly using their white hindquarters as signals.
“That white fishhook can be hoisted like a white-tailed deer’s and can flash back and forth,” Dr. Brisbin explained. “I saw them do it, and I saw the rest of the pack honor it.”
Carolina dogs typically go into heat once a year, like wolves, instead of twice, like domesticated dogs. They cover up their scat by pushing dirt over it with their noses, not by using their hindquarters to scratch the ground.
Still, determining just what is and is not a Carolina dog requires a kind of gut instinct. To Mr. Anderson, it’s a matter of “I know it when I see it”; Dr. Brisbin is more blunt.
“The Carolina dog is a breed created by Brisbin,” he said, referring to himself in the third person, “by picking dogs he likes, the type that he thinks typify the ancient dog.”
This is not to say the Carolina dog is more mythic than real. But the problem is that some of the wilder dogs have mated with other breeds - local dogs and even coyotes. Determining just what is a Carolina dog means becoming more finely tuned to the sense that anyone feels stepping into Don Anderson’s enclosed acre. Experiential knowledge is crucial, being able to sense the entirety of the animal and in that way recognize which dog is almost purely Carolina and which is more of a mix.
Most Carolina dogs are ginger-colored, like Australian dingoes, but they can also be black and piebald. Most, but not all, are short-haired.
Some have tiny patches, right above their distinctive almond eyes, that look like a spare set of eyes, what Mr. Anderson calls “spirit eyes.” Some have an unusual white stripe at the shoulder. There are the noticeable ears and the tail, but also the athletic tucked-in stomach (like a Doberman). DNA studies may soon make it easier to assert the Carolina’s distinctions from other dogs.
Early Sightings
Awareness of this unusual dog has its own history. According to Mark Eden, another enthusiast working with Mr. Anderson, the journals of the 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto include possible references to Carolina dogs.
In the essential narrative of early American natural history, William Bartram’s 1791 book “Bartram’s Travels,” the author runs across a Seminole Indian maintaining some horses and writes: “One occurrence, remarkable here, was a troop of horse under the control and care of a single black dog, which seemed to differ in no respect from the wolf of Florida, except his being able to bark as the common dog.”
In his journal for Feb. 16, 1806, Meriwether Lewis writes of an “Indian dog” that is “party coloured; black white brown and brindle” with “ears erect and pointed like those of the wolf” and used by American Indians to hunt elk.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dog’s wildness and its ginger coat - and probably its use by the poor as a hunting dog - led to the name “yaller dog,” typically spelled that way except by the kind of manor-born people who say “chitterlings.”
And that may have given rise to the term “yellow dog Democrat” to describe the anti-Republican die-hard in the South, as in the 1920s slogan “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket.”
The occasional revival of interest in the Carolina dog happens this time just as enthusiasts make the case for its inclusion among the ancient dogs the world over. Dr. Brisbin also suggests that the Carolina dog fits in the niche of “pariah dogs,” dingo-like and appearing to survive in difficult habitats, like Don Anderson’s swamps, typically on the outskirts of ancient human migration routes.
There are many of these older dogs: the Canaan dog of Israel, the Santal hound of India, the Jindo of Korea, the Telomian of Malaysia, the New Guinea singing dog, the Kintamani dog of Bali, the African basenji - and the images that pop up in a Web search are oddly similar to those of the Carolina dog.
Continents and millenniums aside, they possess many of the qualities Dr. Brisbin and Mr. Anderson describe. These primitive dogs started living near people tens of thousands of years ago, finding a place just out of sight of human encampments - where, if the current studies hold up, they steadfastly remain.
A Village Invents a Language All Its Own
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, July 14, 2013
There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children living in a remote village in northern Australia.
Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan, has been studying the young people’s speech for more than a decade and has concluded that they speak neither a dialect nor the mixture of languages called a creole, but a new language with unique grammatical rules.
The language, called Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, is spoken only by people under 35 in Lajamanu, an isolated village of about 700 people in Australia’s Northern Territory. In all, about 350 people speak the language as their native tongue. Dr. O’Shannessy has published several studies of Light Warlpiri, the most recent in the June issue of Language.
“Many of the first speakers of this language are still alive,” said Mary Laughren, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not involved in the studies. One reason Dr. O’Shannessy’s research is so significant, she said, “is that she has been able to record and document a ‘new’ language in the very early period of its existence.”
Everyone in Lajamanu also speaks “strong” Warlpiri, an aboriginal language unrelated to English and shared with about 4,000 people in several Australian villages. Many also speak Kriol, an English-based creole developed in the late 19th century and widely spoken in northern Australia among aboriginal people of many different native languages.
Lajamanu parents are happy to have their children learn English for use in the wider world, but eager to preserve Warlpiri as the language of their culture.
Lajamanu’s isolation may have something to do with the creation of a new way of speaking. The village is about 550 miles south of Darwin, and the nearest commercial center is Katherine, about 340 miles north. There are no completely paved roads.
An airplane, one of seven owned by Lajamanu Air, a community-managed airline, lands on the village’s dirt airstrip twice a week carrying mail from Katherine, and once a week a truck brings food and supplies sold in the village’s only store. A diesel generator and a solar energy plant supply electricity.
The village was established by the Australian government in 1948, without the consent of the people who would inhabit it. The native affairs branch of the federal government, concerned about overcrowding and drought in Yuendumu, forcibly removed 550 people from there to what would become Lajamanu. At least twice, the group walked all the way back to Yuendumu, only to be retransported when they arrived.
Contact with English is quite recent. “These people were hunters and gatherers, roaming over a territory,” said Dr. O’Shannessy. “But then along came white people, cattle stations, mines, and so on. People were kind of forced to stop hunting and gathering.”
By the 1970s, villagers had resigned themselves to their new home, and the Lajamanu Council had been set up as a self-governing community authority, the first in the Northern Territory. In the 2006 census, almost half the population was under 20, and the Australian government estimates that by 2026 the number of indigenous people 15 to 64 will increase to 650 from about 440 today.
Dr. O’Shannessy, who started investigating the language in 2002, spends three to eight weeks a year in Lajamanu. She speaks and understands both Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, but is not fluent.
People in Lajamanu often engage in what linguists call code-switching, mixing languages together or changing from one to another as they speak. And many words in Light Warlpiri are derived from English or Kriol.
But Light Warlpiri is not simply a combination of words from different languages. Peter Bakker, an associate professor of linguistics at Aarhus University in Denmark who has published widely on language development, says Light Warlpiri cannot be a pidgin, because a pidgin has no native speakers. Nor can it be a creole, because a creole is a new language that combines two separate tongues.
“These young people have developed something entirely new,” he said. “Light Warlpiri is clearly a mother tongue.”
Dr. O’Shannessy offers this example, spoken by a 4-year-old: Nganimpa-ng gen wi-m si-m worm mai aus-ria. (We also saw worms at my house.)
It is easy enough to see several nouns derived from English. But the -ria ending on “aus” (house) means “in” or “at,” and it comes from Warlpiri. The -m ending on the verb “si” (see) indicates that the event is either happening now or has already happened, a “present or past but not future” tense that does not exist in English or Warlpiri. This is a way of talking so different from either Walpiri or Kriol that it constitutes a new language.
The development of the language, Dr. O’Shannessy says, was a two-step process. It began with parents using baby talk with their children in a combination of the three languages. But then the children took that language as their native tongue by adding radical innovations to the syntax, especially in the use of verb structures, that are not present in any of the source languages.
Why a new language developed at this time and in this place is not entirely clear. It was not a case of people needing to communicate when they have no common language, a situation that can give rise to pidgin or creole.
Dr. Bakker says that new languages are discovered from time to time, but until now no one has been there at the beginning to see a language develop from children’s speech.
Dr. O’Shannessy suggests that subtle forces may be at work. “I think that identity plays a role,” she said. “After children created the new system, it has since become a marker of their identity as being young Warlpiri from the Lajamanu Community.”
The language is now so well established among young people that there is some question about the survival of strong Warlpiri. “How long the kids will keep multilingualism, I don’t know,” Dr. O’Shannessy said. “The elders would like to preserve Warlpiri, but I’m not sure it will be. Light Warlpiri seems quite robust.”
Hobbits’ Size Not Likely Linked to Growth Disorders
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, July 15, 2013
So much about the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits remains roundly contentious 10 years after their fossils were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. But a new study has weighed in with strong support for the original hypothesis about them: that they were remnants of a previously unknown distinct species of the genus Homo that lived as recently as 17,000 years ago.
Detailed comparisons show that the single skull among the skeletal remains is “clearly distinct” from skulls of healthy modern humans, the study said. Thus the fossil specimen may well deserve its designation as a representative of an extinct species, which scientists have called Homo floresiensis.
Much of the debate has centered on arguments by skeptics that these small-bodied, small-brained hominins were nothing more than modern Homo sapiens who had one of a number of growth disorders, possibly microcephaly, Laron syndrome or endemic hypothyroidism, known as cretinism.
In a paper in the journal PLoS One, the researchers said their findings “counter the hypotheses of pathological conditions.”
The lead author, Karen L. Baab, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University on Long Island, said the findings provided the most precise and comprehensive measurements to date of outer shape - every ridge and groove, every lump and bump - of the H. floresiensis cranium.
These measurements were compared with skulls of extinct fossil hominins, including Homo erectus, Neanderthals and other archaic Homo species, and with skulls of normal modern humans as well as humans that had each of the pathological conditions.
The researchers, who included Kieran P. McNulty of the University of Minnesota and Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany, concluded that the H. floresiensis cranium was more similar to the various fossil hominins than to normal modern humans or those with pathologies. Dr. Baab said in an interview that they “tried to test pretty much every hypothesis” and provide “a much more complete view” of the hobbit cranium shape compared with previous studies.
She said the findings complemented earlier research led by Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University who specializes in brain evolution. They used CT scans to create internal casts showing the shape of the brain from the impression it left on the inner surface of the skull. They concluded that the hobbit was a new species closely related to H. erectus and was not a human that had microcephaly.
The H. floresiensis fossils were found in 2003, buried in sediments in a wide-mouth cave known as Liang Bua. From that name came the LB1 label for the single cranium, which is no bigger than a grapefruit. The size suggests that the brain was less than one-third the size of a human’s. From other skeletal remains of eight individuals, the hobbits stood not much more than three feet tall, walked upright and were anatomically more primitive than H. sapiens.
If only, anthropologists say, they had more than a sample of one skull with which to work.