Chapter Eleven: The Later Migrations

Regardless of whether or not the Toba eruption can be safely regarded as the cause of the gap I’ve been making so much of, it does seem likely that some sort of disastrous event, centered in roughly the same region, must have taken place at some point after the completion of the “southern route” migration, because the gap is real, and must be accounted for. Before proceeding to discuss the aftereffects of such an event, let’s review the (hypothetical) sequence of events leading up to, and including, it:

1.      The development of HBC (the Hypothetical Baseline Culture of our most recent common ancestors) from traditions inherited from the oldest human ancestors, based in turn on the behavioral patterns and traditions of their pre-human primate ancestors.

2.      The development of HMC (the Hypothetical Migrant Culture of the Out of Africa émigrés) from HBC, as modified by events subsequent to the divergence of the proto-Pygmy and proto-Bushmen populations from the ancestral group.

3.      The spread of HMC in colonies scattered throughout the Indian Ocean coast, from the western border of what is now Pakistan, through southern India, and onward to Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia, and the Sahul (New Guinea and Australia, joined at the time by a land bridge).

4.     The occurrence of a large-scale disaster of some sort, centered in South Asia, that would have precipitated major changes in the population patterns, genetic markers, social structure and culture of all colonies along the coast of South Asia; but would, for the most part, have spared those to the east of India. In the areas most affected, those colonies that survived would have been seriously decimated, producing what geneticists refer to as “population bottlenecks.”

This event could have been a major volcanic eruption, such as the explosion of Mt. Toba, ca 74,000 ya – the prevailing northwesterly winds would have carried vast amounts of Toba ash into the heart of the South Asian Peninsula while sparing most points due north, east and south of the eruption site (in northern Sumatra); however, a major Tsunami, centered somewhere southeast of India could possibly have had much the same effect – the southern route implies a maritime culture, focused on sea-based resources, and thus especially vulnerable to an event of this sort; or possibly a major flood – weather patterns affecting the Indian Ocean area are dominated by the monsoon cycle, which can produce very heavy flooding during the summer months; or a prolonged drought – the same monsoon cycle can produce several successive months of little to no precipitation, and an anomalously weak monsoon season could leave the entire area seriously devoid of water.

We are now in a position to take our story beyond the disastrous event, whatever its cause, to consider the all important subsequent migrations leading to the demographic and cultural patterns we see today. We can begin by taking another look at the fascinating “isofrequency maps” introduced in the previous chapter: 

(See Fig. 10.2, Chapter Ten)

Maps B and C especially tell a remarkable story. Given the Toba scenario we've been exploring, it seems clear that the resulting bottlenecks would have led to fundamental changes, away from the typically African characteristics of HMP and HMC, toward those more typical of what we now see among most (though not all) of the various “racial” and large-scale “ethnic” subdivisions of Asia, Europe, the Americas, etc. However, since India would have borne the brunt of the disaster, it might seem likely that a repopulated India would have been the principal staging ground for the migrations that would have spread the newly altered genetic/cultural lineages to the four corners of the world. But maps B and C tell a different story. According to map B, India has remained relatively isolated, while the scenario implied in map C suggests a massive migration rooted east of India, and spreading both north and northwest from there, with the Himalayas as a significant barrier, channeling the migrants away from India and in the direction of Central Asia and, ultimately, Europe.

Another map, Figure 5 from the same paper, is explicitly devoted to the migration pathways, but from a somewhat broader perspective:

Figure 11.1 Eurasia -- later migrations (Metspalu et al. 2004) 

From the caption:

Peopling of Eurasia. Map of Eurasia and northeastern Africa depicting the peopling of Eurasia as inferred from the extant mtDNA phylogeny. . . [T]he initial split between West and East Eurasian mtDNAs is postulated between the Indus Valley and Southwest Asia. Spheres depict expansion zones where, after the initial (coastal) peopling of the continent, local branches of the mtDNA tree (haplogroups given in the spheres) arose (ca. 40,000 – 60,000 ybp), and from where they were further carried into the interior of the continent (thinner black arrows). Admixture between the expansion zones has been surprisingly limited ever since.

Though it's extremely difficult to account for every aspect of the genetic picture in terms consistent with a Toba-like hypothesis (or any other hypothesis), I'd like to propose the following, necessarily provisional, post-disaster scenario:

1.      ca 74,000 ya: Population bottleneck or bottlenecks produced by the disaster, with varying degrees of intensity depending on how close each population is to the center of the disruptive event. The effect of each bottleneck will be different, depending on completely unpredictable circumstances associated with each group affected. In each case, either the group or its lineage does not survive at all, or, if it does survive, its character, both physical and cultural, will be determined contingently by the unique qualities of each new founder group and the environment in which it finds itself.

2.      ca 73,000 - 70,000 ya: We can't be sure how many such bottlenecks would have occurred. It's even conceivable that only one group might have survived in the general area, either in India itself or to the east. Or possibly there were many groups with at least a few survivors each, and thus many different founder effects. It's also very difficult if not impossible, at least at this time, to correlate such founder effects with the genetic evidence. A major disaster may well have produced one or many population bottlenecks by destroying human life en masse, but we have no reason to assume it would have produced even a single mutation. So it might be a mistake to read a separate founder effect into each different branch of M, N, or R.

Following Oppenheimer, I will at this point explore the possibility he raises, that the Toba eruption would have completely destroyed all humans caught within range of the thickest fallout, which means that the tribal populations we now see in India originated either west or east of the subcontinent, from where various scenarios of repopulation would have occurred. If the pocket we identified in the northwest Punjab-Kashmir region survived, then west India might have been repopulated from there. As for repopulation from the east, any groups living just east of India during the Toba blast would almost certainly have suffered serious bottlenecks and may well have lost at least some of their original African traditions.

This could explain the absence of significant P/B characteristics in their music, especially since P/B is a highly group-oriented practice and the major loss of life coupled with scarcity of food and other resources might well have seriously eroded the social fabric -- as documented by Turnbull for the Ik (see previous chapter). It could also have affected many other traditions since many if not all the old rituals might have been suspended during a period when survival may have depended, literally, on the behavior of the strongest, most violent and most ruthless, rather than the most cooperative, peace loving and selfless, which may have been the traditional HMC ethic.

So the gap we now see centered in India, might well represent a displacement of a gap that really began farther east -- and was transmitted to India over time by neighboring groups east of the border that eventually migrated there. It's important to remember that a great many groups now living in East and Southeast Asia appear to have also lost many of the same African traditions, probably as a result of the same disastrous event, so it would be a mistake to locate the gap only in South Asia.

As we’ve seen, survivals of old HMC traditions, especially the musical ones, can be found today largely among marginalized groups living in isolated refuge areas in a vast region stretching from the Malay Peninsula to Indonesia, the Philippines and Melanesia, and also northward among certain tribal groups of South China and Taiwan. Since we see so many HBC and HMC traditions (and often African morphology as well) among such groups, it's not difficult to conclude that they must originally have been located far enough to the east or south to suffer least from the effects of the disaster and thus manage to hold on to most (though clearly not all) of their original traditions.

3.    ca 70,000 - 40,000 ya. According to the genetic evidence, the population of south Asia seems to have undergone a major expansion at some point after the bottleneck event. However, as the maps suggest, the region seems to have been relatively self-contained during most of the paleolithic and neolithic as well, with many groups migrating into the region but relatively few migrating out.

4.      ca. 60,000 - 20,000 ya. The genetic maps reproduced above reveal population clines emanating in all directions, but mainly from southeast Asia to the north and northwest. It seems likely that there were major migrations into central Asia, east Asia, northeast Asia and probably also north to Siberia at various points during this very long period. And since many of the peoples now inhabiting these regions have varying degrees of so-called “mongoloid” features, it’s possible to speculate that such features may have originated with a single, relatively small, post-bottleneck founder group based somewhere to the east of what is now Bangladesh. During this same period and for some time afterward, it seems likely that a considerable amount of mixing, both “racial” and cultural, was taking place in greater southeast Asia, including the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines, South China and portions of Melanesia and Micronesia. The complexity of this region is reflected in the truly bewildering variety of musical styles therein. Of all the regions of the world, this may well be the most difficult to characterize.

Alternatives

So what has been learned from our explorations so far, and what other options might we consider as we attempt to relate various possibilities to the evidence? And I suppose the answer would be that one’s conclusions will depend, to some extent, on the sort of problems that come to mind. If one sees no problem with a straightforward functionalist/diffusionist explanation for the cultural, morphological and genetic similarities and differences we now see in the world around us, and are content to accept independent invention as the best explanation for all the many widespread but isolated similarities not easily attributable to cultural diffusion, then there is no problem with the most straightforward Out of Africa scenario: a small group of humans migrated from Africa to Asia; their descendants expanded along the southern coast of that continent, settling at first in India, where they quickly expanded throughout all of South Asia, with some continuing on to Southeast Asia and eventually migrating from there to East Asia, Siberia and Central Asia, with one or more of the Western colonies branching out to Europe at some point.

The many differences we now see in the world around us would therefore be due to the various adaptations people made to the different environments in which they found themselves; and the similarities would be due to the ways in which certain cultural elements diffused over time from one group to another -- or else to the workings of “convergent evolution,” where, by virtue of some inborn, universal process that can't really be explained, different groups in different places find themselves evolving in a similar direction.

This is one way of thinking about the Out of Africa model, and about anthropology generally, and if one is not overly critical it might seem the most likely and/or reasonable scenario. Whatever problems it might encounter can be attributed to our lack of detailed information regarding exactly how certain features get diffused from one group to another to facilitate change, or how certain practices can be explained as “cost-effective” adaptations to environmental pressures, or how various encounters and interactions among various neighboring groups can produce, via some sort of genetic and/or cultural “drift,” large geographical regions that differ from one another, morphologically, genetically and culturally. This all fits quite nicely with anthropology as currently practiced, where almost all the effort is concentrated on sifting through the myriad details required to explain all the many mini-problems that will invariably emerge from such a vaguely defined model.

However, this very “reasonable” approach to human evolution breaks down when we attempt to deal with certain problems that become evident only when we do something very few anthropologists of today seem willing to do: carefully and critically examine the patterns that emerge when we consider the large-scale distribution of cultural practices worldwide.

The current mainstream approach is a bit like the old Ptolemaic theory of the universe, where the Earth was at the center and all the heavenly bodies revolved around it according to “epicycles” that could only be determined through painstaking and detailed observation and calculation, not at all unlike the laborious efforts of all the armies of anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, etc. seeking to make sense of the human world by either counting and classifying every single stone, bone and shard or interviewing every “native” in sight.

The Asiatic Mainstream

What convinced me that there is something very wrong with this near-sighted view was my discovery, thanks to Alan Lomax, of the remarkably consistent large-scale patterns we become aware of as we systematically study the various musical practices of traditional cultures on a worldwide basis. And once that door is opened, a magnificent socio-cultural vista becomes discernible, rich with many other possibilities -- and problems. (For a review of the worldwide musical evidence, based on a hypothetical phylogenetic tree and a set of coordinated maps, see Appendix B: A Phylogenetic Tree of Musical Style.)

As far as Asia is concerned, almost the entire continent is now dominated by either solo singing  or group singing in unison, in a manner radically different from just about anything we find in Subsaharan Africa today (aside from societies heavily influenced by Islam). I’m speaking of a particular, highly distinctive style and its various substyles, all very different from P/B or any other typically African music. “Elaborate style,” as Alan Lomax called it, is a type of vocalizing characterized by intricate tonal embellishments; highly verbal; tending toward long, complex phrases and through-composed forms, often built around various combinations of “mosaic” elements; narrow intervals; frequent use of microtones and other types of vocal nuance; improvisation; tense, constricted vocal timbre; precise enunciation of consonants.

Such performances are often accompanied by instruments playing in unison or with variants of the same melodic line in a manner technically called “heterophony.” This is a style of music-making commonly found throughout Asia, from the Middle East (including North Africa) to Pakistan and India, to East Asia, Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia, and, in a somewhat less extreme form, Central Asia as well.

The contrast with Sub-Saharan Africa isn't universal, and there are in fact certain types of repetitive singing based on short phrases tossed back and forth in call and response style -- but almost always with tense voices and in unison, as polyphony of any kind is rare. This type of vocalizing is quite different from the relaxed, open-throated, highly group-oriented, often elaborately interwoven part singing associated with what I’ve been calling the “African Signature.”


Asian mainstream instrumental music is not as easily characterized, and somewhat more varied, but is also dominated by heterophony and also tends toward complex, highly elaborated microtonal structures, often performed in a virtuosic, highly nuanced manner. When polyphony appears it is almost always produced by a drone part rather than independent lines, even in large ensembles. Again, this type of performance is radically different from what is typical for Africa, where embellishment, microtones and nuance are rare. (As always, there are exceptions, but in most cases they are associated with Islamic influence.)


 Some Examples

A more or less typical example of tense-voiced, embellished leader-chorus interchange from the Near East, an Arabic love song from Lebanon: Audio Example 26:Lebanese Love Song (from Arabic and Druse Music, Smithsonian Folkways).

Compare with this somewhat similar example from the province of Assam, in India: Audio Example 27: Toka Bihu (from Bihu, Smithsonian Folkways).

Some examples of very similar types of tense-voiced solo vocalizing, with unison or heterophonic instrumental accompaniment, from widely separated regions of Asia:  

Laos: Audio Example 28:LoveSong (Music of Southeast Asia, Smithsonian Folkways FW 04423, track 207).

Korea: Audio Example 29: Chang Poo Ta Ryong (Folk and Classical Music of Korea, Smithsonian Folkways FW04424, track 1).

India: Audio Example 30: FemaleVocal (Music of the Orient, Smithsonian Folkways 04157, track 305).

Japan: Audio Example 31: Ima nu Kazekumo (Folk Music of the Amami Islands, Smithsonian Folkways 04448).

Uzbekistan: Audio Example 32: Uchun Dur (The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan,

 Smithsonian Folkways 40438, track 6).

Mongolia: Audio Example 33: The River Herlen (The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan,

Smithsonian Folkways 40438, track 18).

China (Yi People, Yunnan Province): Audio Example 34: Qingge-Love Song (Baishibai:Songs of the minority nationalities of Yunnan, PAN 2038, track 26).

Turkey: Audio Example 35:I Should Die (Bazaar Istanbul: Music of Turkey, Arc Music).

Questions

Can we account for the wide distribution of such a distinctive style family on the basis of a gradual process of transition from P/B or any other typically African type of music making? Or is this is a style that could only have emerged as the result of some sudden, and indeed radical, change at a very early phase of the Out of Africa migration? Given the wide distribution of the style, not only among the “high cultures” of Asia and North Africa, but also in so much of the same region’s “folk” and even indigenous music as well, combined with the almost total absence of any form of vocal polyphony anywhere in the whole of Asia ¹ (with the exception of the many widely scattered, marginalized and isolated groups I've already mentioned), the latter possibility seems far more likely. If it weren't rooted in so early a stage of human history, then it’s hard to see how its effects could have been so all-encompassing, over such a vast region. Which returns us once again to the Toba question and the possibility of a history making “bottleneck” event. (For a more detailed analysis of the origins and diffusion of this style, see  Appendix B. In terms of my "phylogenetic" nomenclature, "Elaborate Style" is classified as B2a1, and is rooted in the more fundamental post-bottleneck "haplogroup" B2.)

There are, as one might expect, complicating circumstances that cast something of a cloud over such issues, especially since we know of so many migrations, invasions, conquests, far-flung trading arrangements, religious crusades, etc., from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages and beyond, that carried so many cultural elements with them and had such widespread influence. While these relatively recent developments certainly had consequences of great importance, it’s difficult for me to imagine how they could have had so complete and total an impact as to literally obliterate all trace of the African Signature, and indeed almost all trace of polyphonic singing and instrumental performance in so many remote corners of such a vast continent.

1. An important exception is Asiatic Russia, which does indeed have some remarkable polyphonic vocal traditions, though Russian folk polyphony seems more closely related to somewhat similar traditions in Europe and also Georgia (which is itself on the cusp between Europe and Asia) than to anything elsewhere in Asia.

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