nature论文及相数据

The study of language origin and divergence is important for
understanding the history of human populations and their cultures.
The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world
after Indo-European, and there is a long-running debate about its
phylogeny and the time depth of its original divergence1. Here we
perform a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis to examine two competing
hypotheses of the origin of the Sino-Tibetan language family:
the ‘northern-origin hypothesis’ and the ‘southwestern-origin
hypothesis’. The northern-origin hypothesis states that the initial
expansion of Sino-Tibetan languages occurred approximately 4,000–
6,000 years before present (bp; taken as ad 1950) in the Yellow River
basin of northern China2–4, and that this expansion is associated
with the development of the Yangshao and/or Majiayao Neolithic
cultures. The southwestern-origin hypothesis states that an early
expansion of Sino-Tibetan languages occurred before 9,000 years
bp from a region in southwest Sichuan province in China5 or in
northeast India6, where a high diversity of Tibeto-Burman languages
exists today. Consistent with the northern-origin hypothesis, our
Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of 109 languages with 949 lexical
root-meanings produced an estimated time depth for the divergence
of Sino-Tibetan languages of approximately 4,200–7,800 years
bp, with an average value of approximately 5,900 years bp. In
addition, the phylogeny supported a dichotomy between Sinitic
and Tibeto-Burman languages. Our results are compatible with the
archaeological records, and with the farming and language dispersal
hypothesis7 of agricultural expansion in China. Our findings
provide a linguistic foothold for further interdisciplinary studies
of prehistoric human activity in East Asia.