Bouckaert , Bowern & Atkinson have recently produced a fascinating paper, unravelling the mystery of how “Pama–Nyungan, the world’s largest hunter-gatherer language family, came to dominate the Australian continent”, the paper examines a number of expansion hypotheses and uses the Bayesian phylogeographic method to model the expansion of the Pama language family across Australia.
Their works further enforces the ideas that the combination of concomitant changes in the archaeological record, alongside the lack of strong genetic evidence for Holocene population expansion, resulted in Pama-Nyugan languages being carried as part of an expanding package of cultural innovations and potentially facilitated the absorption and assimilation of existing hunter-gatherer groups.
Read the full article here.
