cultural phylogenetics of the tupi language family in lowland south america文化系统发生学的皮语系在低地南美洲.pdfVIP

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America 1 2 3 1 Robert S. Walker *, Søren Wichmann , Thomas Mailund , Curtis J. Atkisson 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, United States of America, 2 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, 3 Bioinformatics Research Center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Abstract Background: Recent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic phylogenies useful for tracing dynamics of human population expansions, reconstructing ancestral cultures, and modeling transition rates of cultural traits over time. Methods: Here we investigate the Tupi expansion, a widely-dispersed language family in lowland South America, with a distance-based phylogeny based on 40-word vocabulary lists from 48 languages. We coded 11 cultural traits across the diverse Tupi family including traditional warfare patterns, post-marital residence, corporate structure, community size, paternity beliefs, sibling terminology, presence of canoes, tattooing, shamanism, men’s houses, and lip plugs. Results/Discussion: The linguistic phylogeny supports a Tupi homeland in west-central Brazil with subsequent major expansions across much of lowland South America. Consistently, ancestral reconstructions of cultural traits over the linguistic phylogeny suggest that social complexity has tended to decline through time, most notably in the independent emergence of several nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Estimated rates of cultural change across the Tupi expansion are on the order of only a few changes per 10,000 years, in acc