wgdavey@zianet.com

The fossil evidence for the origin of modern man in the Horn of Africa is quite convincing although, in the writer’s judgment, a simple acceptance of its correctness should still be viewed with caution. The implication that this "modern man" then migrated from Africa to the entire rest of the world is thus plausible though far from proven. The further implication that these migrations led to the dispersion of surviving languages throughout the world is a speculative, though plausible, extension of the "Out of Africa" thesis.

If these movements out of Africa indeed started when modern man apparently evolved well over 150,000 years ago, they took place largely during the Ice Ages. In addition, we can be fairly confident that the Post-Ice-Age flooding about 11,000 years ago spurred some migration from the now-flooded lands of Seas.

Here we examine the evidence for the "Out of Africa" thesis by studying the linkage between the names of parts of the body found in Africa and in the rest of the world. There are many such links and there are many possible ways of analyzing them. The entire analysis is governed by the two facts that we have found that all the languages of the world are linked with each other and that there is a very strong linkage of all other regions with the Americas.

Migration out of Africa must be governed by the geography of the world, which determines that peoples moving from Africa must either go northwards into the vast Eurasian Plain or eastwards towards India and southern Asia. Any subsequent migrations must be westward, skirting the vast mountain block of the Himalayas. It should be noted that although even today this huge high region constitutes a considerable obstacle, during the probable first years of man’s postulated migration from Africa, one or more Ice Ages made the Himalayan block even more difficult of entry. Additionally, during the cold periods there were huge ice fields, generally inhospitable if not impenetrable, covering northern Eurasia channeling any movements. Simultaneously a contrary effect was the presence of lowered ocean levels that offered now-lost lands in South East Asia.

From now-populated Eurasia, movement was possible through the lands of eastern Eurasia to the Americas as well as possible movement southwards along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. The southward expansion movement through India and the lands of south Asia could, and indeed must, have led to now-islands of Indonesia to the many islands of the Pacific Ocean as well as the Sahul, the land whose remnants are now Papua and Australia. And, most importantly, movement northwards along the West Coast of the Pacific would lead again to the eastern part of Eurasia and thence to the Americas.

Thus we have two major assumptions as the basis of our study.

The first is that all movements out of Africa began by movement into two regions divided by the great mass of the Himalayas. In our study these are defined, somewhat loosely, as Eurasia and SEAS. All subsequent movements are out of these regions.

The second assumption is that movements to the Americas are through the northern region between Asia and North America. We do not (at least initially) consider migration to the Americas across the broad regions of the Pacific Ocean or (as hypothesized by Rivet) via Antarctica. As a corollary we assume that all movements to the Americas are through the northern regions of the Western Pacific coast. The Mongol, Dagur, Manchu, Korea, Ainu, Japan, Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchadl, Aleut, and the Yupik and all Eskimo languages identify these in our study.

In all cases, we might expect to find links between languages along these routes although we must recognize that complete chains of links may be rare as some links will be lost over the course of time.

Simply stated our task is to collect and categorize the links between the Mid East and S. Africa and the rest of the world. This is very onerous since we have identified 1770 links of the two Africa regions with the rest of the world. Of these there are about 800 Mid East links and about 400 South Africa links with Eurasia and SEAS. The 600 other links – with all regions such as the Americas, Papua, and Australia – have no identified links with either Eurasia or SEAS.

We see immediately that if all movements out of Africa must be through either Eurasia or SEAS then about 600 out of 1800 or one-third of have never had, or have lost, any record of a transition through these regions.

We have collected and counted all 1770 of these links and then subdivided them into various categories. We have grouped them according to their origin in the Mid East or South Africa or an origin in both of the African regions, and then according to their linkage to the two alternative exit routes of Eurasia and SEAS. We have then made a grouping of what we may term "secondary links" identifying those that are or are not linked with the Americas. In the case of those linked with the Americas we examine the assumption that all such migrations – from Eurasia or SEAS – must have been through Pacific Eurasia.

The analysis of American links is one possible examination of such secondary links, and in the case of SEAS movements into this region are probably linked to the islands of the Pacific, Papua, and Australia or may have bypassed parts of SEAS. In this regard differences between the countries of the mainland of SEAS and other parts of the region could be significant.

The strength of our approach can be seen in the large number of ways in which we have been able to collect and view the data. We have looked separately at many linkages such as links of the Mid East only with the Americas, with Eurasia, with SEAS, with Australia, and with Papua, and repeated these selections for South Africa alone. We have also looked at parts of our list, from A-E for example, as well as entire lists, R-W, when we believed that it was justified, and also sometimes chosen to look at either the Mid East and South Africa separately or combined. To take advantage of this flexibility we frequently construct separate documents and for this very widespread analysis we made 180 different documents.

In short, we have the ability to address the issues in many ways, but it must be recognized that problems of this magnitude require great efforts in analysis.

The magnitude of the task we have set ourselves is such that we have adopted two simplifying techniques.

The first is to note that, for convenience, we have constructed our lists of names in three roughly equal parts, namely those beginning A though E, F through P, and R though W. Thus for an initial examination we sometimes only review a fraction of the total listings, usually those names listed as A-E. This smaller sample reduces the statistical accuracy of the results but we always have the option of then considering all the information, listed as A-W, and have done this in key circumstances.

The second simplification is to sometimes analyze just one of the regions of Africa rather than both. We have made several studies that are detailed elsewhere that show that comparing the Mid East or South Africa with other regions gives closely similar results and that either can be taken as representative of Africa as a whole. When we chose to do this we usually chose links with the Mid East since the number of links there is about double those with South Africa.

Some of the evidence for the validity of this approach is given in the Figure below.

We must begin by noting that here we are considering only the 1200 links of all links that include Eurasia or Seas. However these constitute about two-thirds of all Africa links and we believe (without specific proof) that it possible or probable that in the other third of the cases the Eurasia or SEAS links have been lost.

Even with this qualification the amount of information is large so that analysis is time consuming but nevertheless it is possible to present the most fundamental aspects of worldwide links with Africa in a single diagram that is given below.

Here the different regions and some links are represented by rectangles and the links are solid or dashed lines. The numbers show the numbers of links between the regions. The information for both the Mid East and South Africa alone are given here. These figures do not include data for the small number of links with both the Mid East and South Africa.

There are three fundamental points.

The first is that three kinds of migrations are indicated that are to the Mid East alone, to SEAS alone, or to both regions together; the separate migrations are shown with solid lines and the joint migration by dashed lines.

The second is that all migrations to Eurasia or SEAS have subsequent strong links with the Americas. In fact both the Eurasia and SEAS links show exactly the same linkage of roughly 60%, with the Americas. Without doubt, all links with Africa are firmly linked with the Americas.

The third is the remarkable similarity between the Mid East and South Africa links. Their links with Eurasia and SEAS separately and with both together are very close. Similarly the subsequent links with and without the Americas are also close. Alternatively stated, both the Mid East and South Africa have the same linkage with the rest of the world. Thus both regions are representative of links with Africa and so we may look at each separately or together. For convenience we sometimes choose one or the other for analysis.

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