A year ago, Dr. Quentin Atkinson, a cultural anthropologist from Auckland University, New Zealand, published a paper in Science proposing that language originated in Southwest Africa. He observed that the diversity of vowels, consonants, and tones is highest in southwestern Africa and used the founder effect to design a model that describes how language originated in Africa, but then lost diversity as groups of people migrated further from the origin. The founder effect describes how genetic diversity is lost when groups break off from a larger population. Attempts to repeat Atkinson’s analysis using his original method have since dispelled Atkinson’s “Out-of-Africa” hypothesis. Replicative studies have also yielded the eastern and Caucasus as two possible origins, reflecting how complicated modeling linguistic evolution can be.
