wood, chucking
Sep. 7th, 2015 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoelevenUPI is running a story discussing a paper about how the genetic distances between walnut forests in asia correlate with the linguistic distances of the peoples who live near those forests. which is to say, walnuts were probably passed along trade routes, resulting in a common origin for linguistic and genetic similarities.
i'm kinda pleased by this paper for a bunch of reasons.
* for a change, the statistics look right. be still, my beating heart! if the stats are right, there's a chance, however small, that the rest of the paper is right. genetic distances were measured by a standard method (in addition to other methods), so they're probably correct, or at least no more wrong than any other estimate. i have no clue about the linguistic distances, but probably some of my readers do.
* trees that produce both edible fruit and useful wood¹ have struck me as just eminently reasonable things for our ancestors to have domesticated, but we don't know much about how they did it. now we know a little more about it.
* apparently, there's a common proto-word -- i have no idea what it technically is called -- for walnut that's common to languages from central asia to the levant (sogdian and tajik to aramaic). i knew the indo-european languages tended to have such, but it's an impressive example, and seems to argue that walnut (wood and fruit) has been extensively traded for a long, long time.
* i've been to some of the oddball places the paper talks about, like kashgar and the hunza valley. they're on (one of) the silk road(s).² turns out that the silk road actually matters for something. who knew?
1: there aren't that many trees which do both. my list looks like: almond, apple, cherry, chestnut, maple (sorta, if you count syrup), oak (were acorns eaten outside of north america?), peach, pear, and walnut. some kinds of pines produce edible nuts, but i'm not sure if they're the same as yield softwoods.
2: as the paper notes, the silk road is more a collective term for a set of trade routes than a specific path. kashgar, though, is on most of them, since its location makes it a good crossroads.
i'm kinda pleased by this paper for a bunch of reasons.
* for a change, the statistics look right. be still, my beating heart! if the stats are right, there's a chance, however small, that the rest of the paper is right. genetic distances were measured by a standard method (in addition to other methods), so they're probably correct, or at least no more wrong than any other estimate. i have no clue about the linguistic distances, but probably some of my readers do.
* trees that produce both edible fruit and useful wood¹ have struck me as just eminently reasonable things for our ancestors to have domesticated, but we don't know much about how they did it. now we know a little more about it.
* apparently, there's a common proto-word -- i have no idea what it technically is called -- for walnut that's common to languages from central asia to the levant (sogdian and tajik to aramaic). i knew the indo-european languages tended to have such, but it's an impressive example, and seems to argue that walnut (wood and fruit) has been extensively traded for a long, long time.
* i've been to some of the oddball places the paper talks about, like kashgar and the hunza valley. they're on (one of) the silk road(s).² turns out that the silk road actually matters for something. who knew?
1: there aren't that many trees which do both. my list looks like: almond, apple, cherry, chestnut, maple (sorta, if you count syrup), oak (were acorns eaten outside of north america?), peach, pear, and walnut. some kinds of pines produce edible nuts, but i'm not sure if they're the same as yield softwoods.
2: as the paper notes, the silk road is more a collective term for a set of trade routes than a specific path. kashgar, though, is on most of them, since its location makes it a good crossroads.