Your mother tongue may come from your father. The language of some societies connects with a prehistoric coming-in of out-of-country males. This is still given signs of in the science of DNA of people today.

Written records are powerless to say to us about the natural development of language before writing was invented. in place, Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge questioned if changes could be discovered via markers like a mother or of a father in DNA DNA.¹ , by having under observation mitochondrial DNA or markers in DNA, separately. Y-chromosome² markers in DNA, separately.

In a great analysis of studies that connected markers handed down from father, mother and so on to art and learning what is, may be handed down in North and Central America, Iceland, Australia, Africa and New Guinea, they found that only Y-chromosome¹ DNA² gave signs of the art and learning starts of the place and nearby language. Iceland, for example, was colonised by Norse Vikings with women took off by force from the UK islands. Most mitochondrial DNA² discovered in Icelandic people today is like to that in the UK islands, while Y-chromosomes¹ keep Scandinavian DNA.² And the Icelandic language has Scandinavian roots, not English (Science, DOI:10.1126/science.1205331).

The discovering suggests an interesting general direction, but it is hard to make out a complete good example from this small selection of observations, says on-going development anthropologist³ Keith Hunley of the University of New Mexico. one expert in language Claire Bowern of Yale university, at the same time points out that the societies covered by this observation make distribution of power through the male line, and the opposite connection may be discovered in societies run by females.

1  DNA  EOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID.  Go back