Jared Diamond , Expansions Farmers and Their Languages : The First

Farmers and their languages: the first expansions.

The largest movements and replacements of human populations since the end of the Ice Ages resulted from the geographically uneven rise of food production around the world. The first farming societies thereby gained great advantages over hunter-gatherer societies. But most of those resulting shifts of populations and languages are complex, controversial, or both. We discuss the main complication...

Jared Diamond, The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

Comparative Study of Interpersonal and Mass Media Usage among Rural Farmers in Kogi State

  This study compared the use of interpersonal and mass media channels of communication among rural farmers in Kogi State, Nigeria. The specific objectives were to describe the socio economic characteristics of the farmers, determine the influence of socioeconomic characteristics on the usage of interpersonal and media channels, ascertain farmers’ level of awareness of interpersonal and media c...

Jared Diamond Confidential Reflections on Writing, Science, and Life

Sometime after a trip to New Guinea in 1972, perhaps the world’s most noted ornithologist-physiologist-turnedevolutionary biologist and biogeographer set about “the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years.” In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize. The book’s thesis, in short, is that specific geographic...

Bayesian phylogenetic analysis supports an agricultural origin of Japonic languages.

Languages, like genes, evolve by a process of descent with modification. This striking similarity between biological and linguistic evolution allows us to apply phylogenetic methods to explore how languages, as well as the people who speak them, are related to one another through evolutionary history. Language phylogenies constructed with lexical data have so far revealed population expansions ...