Chapter 2 Tongues, Texts, and Scripts 49agers in Australia but independently inventing agriculture in New Guinea.
Then, quite recently in this grand view of things, some of those who remained
in Asia began to cultivate grain. At about 6000 B.C.E. they were cultivating mil-
let in North China, and about 5000 B.C.E. they were cultivating rice over a
region stretching from coastal South China through the hills of Burma and
across into India as far as Bihar. We assume that these earliest cultivators were
the first to experience the population growth that accompanies agriculture, and
the first to disperse amongst foraging peoples, displacing and isolating them.
We do not, of course, know anything about their languages. But based on the
hard work of many linguists, we can perhaps piece together a picture as things
stood between the end of the last glaciation, 10,000 years ago, and the period of
the first written texts from China, about the fifteenth century B.C.E.
Several things seem certain to be true during this long period. First, as the
area being discussed is vast, it is unlikely that peoples living there 10,000 years
ago would all have been speaking the same language. However paleolinguists
eventually settle the great debate on the origin(s) of human language, by 10,000
years ago there must have been several, and perhaps many, languages in exis-
tence in East and Southeast Asia. Second, no one could then have been living
in the fully glaciated Himalayas; settlement of the Himalayas by Tibetans and
others came much later. Third, the Neolithic “revolution” must have spread
slowly throughout the human communities in this vast area, but as a popula-
tion acquired the new economy they would quickly have experienced popula-
tion growth at the expense of others. These newly cultivating populations were
Renfrew’s “farming dispersal” at the expense of still-foraging populations.
Austroasiatic
There is a family of about 150 languages called Austroasiatic that we
assume must be the languages of this first population explosion; it includes
Vietnamese and Khmer in Southeast Asia. Over in India it survives among a
few hill tribes such as the Munda. But once they must have been widespread
throughout the region, including South China; the old name for the Yangzi,
jiang, is believed to be Austroasiatic, and from their reconstructed vocabulary
we find linguistic evidence attesting to their knowledge of rice agriculture.
Some cognates of jiang, such as song (Vietnamese), krung, kroung, and karung,
are now general-purpose words for “river.”
Austro-Tai
Somewhat later, around 4500 B.C.E., people who spoke another protolan-
guage called Austro-Tai and also lived in South China began to migrate across
the Formosa Strait to Taiwan. Their subsequent migrations are relatively well
documented archaeologically, and the linguistic evidence for much of what fol-
lows is also strong. Those who remained behind on the mainland of South
China stayed put for millennia and in historic times began moving into South-
east Asia as the Thai, the Shan of northern Burma, and the Lao of Laos. Those