Florida Becomes Only the Fourth State to Offer English-Only Driver’s License Exams

Is this controversial or not? Until now the only official language in the US is english. 

I bet most other US states do not officially offer multilingual exams either.

According to Google search there are about only a total of 19 countries around the world having two or more official languages. 

According to Google search only three US states have officially more than one language (Alaska, Hawaii, South Dakota).

"... Recently, the Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles office announced that all driver’s license exams will be administered in English only, including all knowledge exams, commercial learner’s permit, and commercial driver’s license exams. All road signs are in English, so it’s common sense for all driving exams to only be administered in English. ..."

Florida Will Now Administer English-Only Driver’s License Exams

Mafiöse Strukturen in der Windkraft-Lobby. Wirklich!

Deutsche Sprache, schwierige Sprache! Mafiose, nicht Mafiöse Strukturen. Die Mafia ist keine Möse!

Wieder so ein ätzender schmal  Format Kurzfilm von YouTube!

Mafiöse Strukturen in der Windkraft-Lobby - YouTube

Enduring patterns in world's languages: One-third of grammatical 'universals' stand up to rigorous testing

Amazing stuff!

"... An international team ... used Grambank, the world's most comprehensive database of grammatical features, to test 191 proposed universals across more than 1,700 languages. Traditionally, linguists have attempted to circumvent the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages by sampling widely separated languages.

However, sampling can fail to remove all dependencies, reduce statistical power and does not identify historical pathways. The Bayesian spatio-phylogenetic analyses used by the authors accounted for both the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages—a level of statistical rigor rarely achieved in previous work. ...

The study found strong evidence for patterns involving word order (such as whether verbs precede or follow objects) and hierarchical universals (such as dependencies in which arguments are marked in grammatical agreement). The patterns predicted by the supported universals have evolved repeatedly across the world's languages, suggesting deep-rooted constraints in how humans structure communication. ..."

"To the Point

• Linguistic universals: Of the 191 proposed linguistic universals, about one-third are statistically supported across more than 1,700 languages.
• A wealth of data and state-of-the-art statistical methods: Using Grambank and Bayesian statistical models that control for genealogical and geographic influences, the strongest evidence emerges for patterns of word order and hierarchical agreement.
• Evolutionary framework: The repeated evolution of these patterns suggests there are shared cognitive and communicative constraints, which narrows the search for truly universal features of human language.

..."

From the abstract:

"Human languages show astonishing variety, yet their diversity is constrained by recurring patterns. Linguists have long argued over the extent and causes of these grammatical ‘universals’.

Using Grambank—a comprehensive database of grammatical features across the world’s languages—we tested 191 proposed universals with Bayesian analyses that account for both genealogical descent and geographical proximity.

We find statistical support for about a third of the proposed linguistic universals.

The majority of these concern word order and hierarchical universals: two types that have featured prominently in earlier work.

Evolutionary analyses show that languages tend to change in ways that converge on these preferred patterns.

This suggests that, despite the vast design space of possible grammars, languages do not evolve entirely at random.

Shared cognitive and communicative pressures repeatedly push languages towards similar solutions."

Enduring patterns in world's languages: One-third of grammatical 'universals' stand up to rigorous testing

Enduring patterns in the world’s languages (original news release) "New study finds one-third of grammatical ‘universals’ stand up to rigorous testing"

Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses (open access)

The evolution of a word-order universal on the global language tree. In our analysis of the universal “With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal subject–object–verb order are postpositional”, the absence or presence of the two features defines the ‘state’: state 11 (red) is the prediction made by the universal; in state 00 (black), both features are absent; in states 01 (orange) and 10 (light blue), one feature is absent and the other is present. The ancestral state reconstruction shows that in multiple language families and areas, pathways of language change repeatedly lead to the predicted outcome. 

Fig. 2: Median natural log BF and their 95% HDI from the BayesTraits analyses showing support for co-evolutionary models.

Aiong Taigi is an American YouTuber based in Taiwan who promotes and helps others to learn the native Taiwanese language

 Good news!

Google: "Aiong Taigi is an American YouTuber based in Taiwan known for creating content that promotes and helps others learn the Taiwanese language, or Tâi-gí. Through his videos, he shares his experience learning Taiwanese as a foreigner, discusses Taiwan's language policies, and encourages the use of the language in everyday life, as explained in sources like this Instagram post and this Spotify podcast episode. He has gained a significant following and has collaborated with other Taiwanese language content creators, notes this Reddit post. 

Focus on language preservation: Aiong Taigi's YouTube channel is dedicated to preserving and promoting the Taiwanese language."

Global Taiwan Institute: "YouTube Content Creater "Aiong Taigi" on Preserving Taiwanese and Learning the Inner Language

Taiwanese (台語), also known as Tâi-gí, is the most widely spoken native language in Taiwan. During both the Japanese colonial period and subsequent martial law era (1949-1987), Taiwanese and other indigenous languages faced severe repression. While democratization has restored the freedom to speak Taiwanese openly, new challenges have emerged. As fewer young people speak the language, the question looms: how can this once-flourishing mother tongue survive in an era of globalization?"

阿勇台語 Aiong Taigi (his YouTube channel)

Saving Tâi-gí: Taiwan’s Largest Heritage Language

Rapid Support Forces (RSF) or Reporters sans frontières (RSF)

One abbreviation for two very different things!

Hint: RSF translates to Reporters Without Borders. The The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia allegedly are committing grave atrocities in Darfur.

Saviours of Sanskrit during British colonialism in India

Recommendable!

"‘Pundits’ kept Sanskrit scholarship alive in remote settlements as British control swept across India, a major new research project will show. The largely forgotten literary figures and their works – ranging from erotic plays to legal treatises – are neglected treasures of Indian intellectual achievement, its researchers argue.

English speakers are familiar with the word ‘pundit’ but few know that it comes from the Sanskrit word paṇḍita, meaning ‘learned’. Now a Cambridge University-led project is going in search of the pundits, Brahmin scholars, who kept writing poems, plays, philosophy, theology, legal texts and other forms of literature in Sanskrit as Britain tightened its grip on India.

It has long been assumed that the expansion of British power in India from the seventeenth century steadily suffocated Sanskrit scholarship. But the experts behind an ambitious new project argue that the two centuries leading up to the establishment of the British Raj in 1858 were, in fact, a golden age of Sanskrit intellectual thought, literature, and arts. They point to the scholarly activities of hundreds of pundits dispersed across the Indian countryside in Brahmin settlements (agrahāra) and monasteries (maṭha). ..."

Saviours of Sanskrit "Indian literary genius survived British imperialism in forgotten villages, new research reveals."

What is a holistic approach?

A popular term of art or art for art's sake! Sounds impressive, but may indicate cluelessness or pretension!

So next time you come across someone using this term beware! 😊

Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish language origins

Amazing stuff! Members of two major language families were moving in opposite directions influencing each other.

"Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.

The analysis ... integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results ... identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people. ...

The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia. ...

Proto-Uralic speakers overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, the culture of horseback herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands. A pair of recent papers ... zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland, showing it was mostly likely within the current borders of Ukraine just over 5,000 years ago. 

“We can see these waves going back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families expanded,”  ... “Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east.” ...

Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion ..."

"... The team analyzed genomes from 180 ancient individuals from northern Eurasia, dated between 17,000 and 3,000 years ago. Their findings identify two ancestral populations that gave rise to these two language families: one from the Lena River Basin in eastern Siberia, which contributed significantly to nearly all modern Uralic-speaking populations, and another from the Baikal region in southern Siberia, associated with the genetic legacy of the Ket people.  ..."

From the abstract:

"The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples, but much of their history is poorly understood. In particular, the genomic formation of populations that speak Uralic and Yeniseian languages today is unknown.

Here, by generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals spanning this region, we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal.

Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure.

Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and 

ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers.

We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4,000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy—a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai.

The 16 Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities."

Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language origins — Harvard Gazette "Parent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west"

New DNA Evidence Reveals Origins of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian Languages (original news release)

Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the Uralic and Yeniseian peoples

Map of all the sites that are sources of samples used in the study.

On Improving large language models with concept-aware fine-tuning. Really!

The abstract of this new paper suggests that ML & AI researchers are reinventing the wheel!

The long existing ambiguity about what tokens are in natural language processing is not helpful! Breaking up words into chunks may even be counterproductive! What unit in the spectrum between a single character, a word chunk, a whole word, a sentence or even a whole paragraph etc. should be used for the training of language models? A combination of fine-grained and coarse-grained units or hierarchical-level units etc.

Caveat: I have not read the paper.

From the abstract:

"Large language models (LLMs) have become the cornerstone of modern AI. However, the existing paradigm of next-token prediction fundamentally limits their ability to form coherent, high-level concepts, making it a critical barrier to human-like understanding and reasoning.

Take the phrase "ribonucleic acid" as an example: an LLM will first decompose it into tokens, i.e., artificial text fragments ("rib", "on", ...), then learn each token sequentially, rather than grasping the phrase as a unified, coherent semantic entity. This fragmented representation hinders deeper conceptual understanding and, ultimately, the development of truly intelligent systems.

In response, we introduce Concept-Aware Fine-Tuning (CAFT), a novel multi-token training method that redefines how LLMs are fine-tuned. By enabling the learning of sequences that span multiple tokens, this method fosters stronger concept-aware learning.

Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements compared to conventional next-token finetuning methods across diverse tasks, including traditional applications like text summarization and domain-specific ones like de novo protein design.

Multi-token prediction was previously only possible in the prohibitively expensive pretraining phase; CAFT, to our knowledge, is the first to bring the multi-token setting to the post-training phase, thus effectively democratizing its benefits for the broader community of practitioners and researchers. ..."

[2506.07833] Improving large language models with concept-aware fine-tuning

Trockenfrüchte oder Dörrobst

Schweizerdeutsch (auch Schwizerdütsch) ist manchmal köstlich und pikant!

Credits: Ein Müesli mit viel Trockenobst – das schmeckt gut. Doch es kann der Leber schaden "Weshalb man getrocknete Feigen, Rosinen und anderes Dörrobst nur in geringen Mengen essen sollte und warum frisches Obst gesünder ist."

When will the Chinese people voluntarily adopt the Western alphabet?

Probably not in my lifetime! Food for thought! Voluntary is the operative word here!

One thing seems to be quite sure, outside of Asia most people will probably never adopt the Chinese written language/writing system.

I am not sure machine translation and or AI, now and in the future, can fully make up for the differences in written languages and its consequences.

Will machine learning & AI make the written language obsolete or fully automated? We probably find out in the next 10-20 years.

Would it not be nice, peace and community promoting if all people used the Western alphabet?

More human progress please!

How about e.g. Chinese street signs?

There is apparently no proper English word for the German word Wortschöpfung

This is interesting! The official, common English translation for this German word is neologism. Sounds very exciting and academic! What a turn/put off! Caution: irony!

The English word wordsmith does not even come close. Until now, I thought wordsmith is the closest translation. I was wrong.

Deutschland, das Land der Denker und Dichter! (Germany, the land of thinkers and poets). Notice I reversed the expression Dichter und Denker.

Uniquely human language capacity found in wild bonobos apes

Amazing stuff! This could be strong hint that animals are much more capable of communication than previously thought!

Wow, this field research was conducted in the long time war torn Democratic Republic of Congo!

"... A bonobo dictionary

In a first step, the researchers applied a method developed by linguists to quantify the meaning of human words. “This allowed us to create a bonobo dictionary of sorts – a complete list of bonobo calls and their meaning,” says Mélissa Berthet, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology of UZH and lead researcher of the study. “This represents an important step towards understanding the communication of other species, as it is the first time that we have determined the meaning of calls across the whole vocal repertoire of an animal.”

Compositionality is not unique to humans

After determining the meaning of single bonobo vocalizations, the researchers then moved on to investigating call combinations, using another approach borrowed from linguistics. “With our approach, we were able to quantify how the meaning of bonobo single calls and call combinations relate to each other,” ... The researchers found numerous call combinations whose meaning was related to the meaning of their single parts, a key hallmark of compositionality.  Furthermore, some of the call combinations bore a striking resemblance to the more complex nontrivial compositional structures in human language. “This suggests that the capacity to combine call types in complex ways is not as unique to humans as we once thought,” ..."

"After determining the meaning of single bonobo vocalizations, the researchers then moved on to investigating call combinations, using another approach borrowed from linguistics. “With our approach, we were able to quantify how the meaning of bonobo single calls and call combinations relate to each other,” says Simon Townsend, UZH Professor and senior author of the study. The researchers found numerous call combinations whose meaning was related to the meaning of their single parts, a key hallmark of compositionality.  Furthermore, some of the call combinations bore a striking resemblance to the more complex nontrivial compositional structures in human language. “This suggests that the capacity to combine call types in complex ways is not as unique to humans as we once thought,” ... "

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

One hallmark of human language is the combination of elements into larger meaningful structures, a pattern referred to as compositionality. Compositionality can be trivial, in which the two parts are added together to give meaning, or nontrivial, in which the meaning in one part modifies the meaning in the other. Recent research has found the presence of trivial compositionality across a number of species, but it has been argued that nontrivial compositionality is unique to humans. 

Berthet et al. used a large dataset of bonobo vocalizations in conjunction with a distributional semantics approach and found that not only did they display compositionality, but three of the four types were nontrivial. ...

Abstract

Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum of the meaning of its parts) or nontrivial (one element modifies the meaning of the other element).

Recent studies have suggested that animals lack nontrivial compositionality, representing a key discontinuity with language.

In this work, using methods borrowed from distributional semantics, we investigated compositionality in wild bonobos and found that not only does each call type of their repertoire occur in at least one compositional combination, but three of these compositional combinations also exhibit nontrivial compositionality.

These findings suggest that compositionality is a prominent feature of the bonobo vocal system, revealing stronger parallels with human language than previously thought."

‘Uniquely human’ language capacity found in bonobos | Science | AAAS "In a first, researchers have seen a nonhuman animal combine different calls to make new meanings"

Bonobos Combine Calls in Similar Ways to Human Language (original news release) "Bonobos – our closest living relatives – create complex and meaningful combinations of calls resembling the word combinations of humans. This study ... challenges long-held assumptions about what makes human communication unique and suggests that key aspects of language are evolutionary ancient."

Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos (open access)

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin 😊

When did human language emerge? Genomic evidence may have an answer

Amazing stuff! So Homo sapiens was speechless (or in linguistic  incapacity) for about the first 100,000 years? Hard to stomach! 😀

This research seems to be a bit to speculative for my taste! I guess the crucial term here is "linguistic capacity".

"A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.

Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old. Estimates of when language originated vary widely, based on different forms of evidence, from fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new analysis took a different approach. ...

“Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate about the geographic divergence of early human populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before.” ..."

From the abstract:

"Recent genome-level studies on the divergence of early Homo sapiens, based on single nucleotide polymorphisms, suggest that the initial population division within H. sapiens from the original stem occurred approximately 135 thousand years ago.

Given that this and all subsequent divisions led to populations with full linguistic capacity, it is reasonable to assume that the potential for language must have been present at the latest by around 135 thousand years ago, before the first division occurred. Had linguistic capacity developed later, we would expect to find some modern human populations without language, or with some fundamentally different mode of communication. Neither is the case. While current evidence does not tell us exactly when language itself appeared, the genomic studies do allow a fairly accurate estimate of the time by which linguistic capacity must have been present in the modern human lineage. Based on the lower boundary of 135 thousand years ago for language, we propose that language may have triggered the widespread appearance of modern human behavior approximately 100 thousand years ago."

When did human language emerge? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "A new analysis suggests our language capacity existed at least 135,000 years ago, with language used widely perhaps 35,000 years after that."

Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago

Table 1. Summary of estimates of divergence times for Khoisan lineage.

How many languages can babies learn? Study shows how Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages

Amazing stuff! The Tower of Babel is a baby? I wish I could speak this many languages.

I did not have the time to check whether these articles below also discuss how different these local languages are. My suspicion is some of these local languages might be somewhat similar, maybe even like dialects.

According to Wikipedia: "Eleven languages have the status of government-sponsored languages: three Akan dialects (Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi and Fante) and two Mole–Dagbani languages (Dagaare and Dagbanli). The others are Ewe, Dangme, Ga, Nzema, Gonja, and Kasem."

"Africa is a multilingual continent and many adults speak several languages fluently. An empirical study ... now shows that the roots of this multilingualism can be found in infancy: In Ghana, most babies grow up multilingually, with most of them coming into contact with two to six languages and just as many regular speakers of each language. ...

The researchers also showed that the babies heard some languages primarily indirectly – i.e. via radio, television or background conversations – while other languages were used by their caregivers to directly communicate with them. ...

the number of caregivers the children have also ranges between two and six, and babies who have more adults in their daily lives who regularly take care of them also hear more different languages. ...

A key finding of the study is the distinction between direct and indirect language input. While English is primarily acquired through indirect channels such as television and official communication, children receive most of the local languages (such as Akan, Ga and Ewe) through direct contact with their caregivers. ...

The study makes it clear that it is not only the number of languages a child hears, but also the diversity of people and the different forms of input that have a decisive influence on language acquisition. “Our research shows that for many children, a multilingual environment is a dynamic, vibrant reality from the very beginning. Multilingualism is not just a bonus, but a fundamental part of children's identity and social structure,” the researcher says."

From the highlights and abstract:

"Highlights

• Infant language input was estimated in a highly multilingual environment.

• Tools were a Language Input Estimate interview protocol and a logbook over a day.

• Ghanaian infants are raised multilingually, with between two and six languages.

• Infants with more input providers also hear more different languages.

• Ghanaian infants get more indirect than direct input in Ghanaian English

Abstract

Examining the language input experiences of infants growing up in multilingual African environments is essential to understanding their language acquisition.

We explored the language input to 3;0–12;0-month-old infants (N = 121) in Ghana (Sub-Saharan Africa), a non-Western and less-economically rich social context and highly multilingual country. Data collection involved an interview assessment, followed by caregivers completing a 12-hour logbook to indicate the languages their child heard over a day.

Results demonstrated consistency of the infant's language exposure across both input measurement tools, suggesting their reliability. Results revealed that Ghanaian infants are raised multilingually, exposed to between two and six languages, and engage with between two and six regular input providers.

There was no evidence for associations of age with number of languages or regular input providers. Analyses of the relative amount of input in Ghanaian English, Akan, Ewe, and Ga, revealed that infants receive less direct than indirect input in Ghanaian English, with no such difference observed in Akan, Ewe, Ga, and no evidence of age effects. These findings shed light on the language environment and input to African infants raised in multilingual societies, highlighting the impact of social and cultural contexts on linguistic input. We conclude with reflections on studying infants in non-Western, less-economically Rich social contexts in multilingual Africa."

How many languages can babies learn? Study shows how Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages

How many languages can you learn at the same time? – Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages (original news release)

Exploring the nature of multilingual input to infants in multiple caregiver families in an African city: The case of Accra (Ghana) (open access)

Fig. 1. Percentage of infants and the number of input languages reported in the CIME and logbook.

Male chimps ask with gestures for sex in different ‘dialects’ and they vary by community

Amazing stuff! 

The convenient and usual blame on humans should be discounted!

"Just like humans, chimpanzees have different “dialects”—in the gestures they use to communicate. A new study has found that males from different chimp communities in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast use different gestures to signal to females that they’re in the mood for sex.

Male chimps can make various moves to show they want some “sneaky copulation on the side,” ... When Wittig’s team looked at records of 495 of these gestures in four neighboring chimp communities, they found clear differences. In two of the four groups, for example, males tore strips from leaves to request sex. Another gesture, the “knuckle knock”—repeatedly knocking knuckles onto a tree or another hard surface—occurred in only one. ..."

From the abstract:

"The horizontal transmission of cultural knowledge is a powerful mechanism of evolutionary change. Across taxa, group-specific cultural traditions are expressed in diverse contexts, such as foraging, tool use, self-care and socialization. These traditions arise when group members converge on specific behavioral phenotypes. When these behavioral phenotypes involve communicative signals, such as gestures, they are termed dialects.

However, gestural dialects are rare in non-humans. Behavioral phenotypes and traditions can also be lost, a well-documented phenomenon in humans, but rarely documented in non-human animals. Here, we find that chimpanzee gestures produced in copulation solicitations show culturally established phenotypes and undergo cultural loss due to human-induced population decline."

ScienceAdviser

Male chimps ask for sex in different ‘dialects’ "Gestures are in danger because of poaching and other human pressures"

Signal traditions and cultural loss in chimpanzees (open access)

Figure 1 Evidence for socially derived gesture dialects in chimpanzees.

Two Landmark studies track source of Indo-European languages to the Caucasus Lower Volga people and waves of migration

Amazing stuff! Stunning! Very recommendable! The discovery of a missing link or the melting pot of the Indo-European languages.

Plus, it is even relevant for the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War!

"... A pair of landmark studies ... has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40 percent of the world’s population.

DNA evidence places them in current-day Russia during the Eneolithic period about 6,500 years ago. These linguistic pioneers were spread from the steppe grasslands along the lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, with researchers dubbing them the Caucasus Lower Volga people. Genetic results show they mixed with other groups in the region. ...

The influential 2007 book “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World” ... represented a deep dive into the Yamnaya’s role in disseminating a proto-Indo-European language that predated writing.

These nomadic pastoralists ... The Yamnaya were probably the first to herd on horseback and early adopters (if not inventors) of oxen-towed wagons. ...

With larger herds and superior mobility, the Yamnaya started exporting their economy — and their language — about 5,000 years ago. “They spread from the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas all the way to Mongolia on one side and as far as Ireland on the other — 6,000 kilometers!”  ...

The 2015 Nature paper credited the Yamnaya with carrying Indo-European languages across Europe and into the Indian subcontinent. Later papers ..., followed their genetic footprints into Greece, Armenia, India, and China. ...

The Caucasus Lower Volga people appear to be that original source, with newly uncovered links to both the Yamnaya and the ancient Indo-Anatolian speakers who inhabited an area that is now part of Turkey. ...

“It’s the first time we have a genetic picture unifying all Indo-European languages,”  ...

But the Russia-Ukraine war forced an unusual splintering of the findings.

A first paper, focused on the origins of Indo-European languages, draws on the ancient DNA of 354 individuals at archaeological sites in Russia and Southeastern Europe.

A second [paper], authored with researchers in Kyiv, is based on 81 ancient DNA samples drawn from Ukraine and Moldova. Also part of the analyses are genetic data on nearly 1,000 previously reported ancient individuals. ...

The first paper traces various lineages from the Caucasus Lower Volga people, including the Yamnaya and the Anatolians, while samples analyzed for the 

second [paper] provided rich new context on the “Yamna” (the Ukrainian term for Yamnaya). The paper finds evidence that the culture may have taken root somewhere near the small town of Mykhailivka in the southern part of the war-torn country. ...

What is now clear is that a population of Caucasus Lower Volga people moved west and started mixing with locals, thereby forming the distinct Yamnaya genome. ...

Language isn’t the only tradition the Yamnaya carried on from their Caucasus Lower Volga forebears. Both cultures buried their dead in kurgans, or large tombs with earth mounded on top. These graves, which still dot the region’s flat landscape, attracted generations of archaeologists and have now enabled “the genetic reconstruction of their makers’ origins presented here,”  ..."

From the abstract (1):

"The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 bc across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 bc it reached its maximal extent, ranging from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize Yamnaya origins among the preceding Eneolithic people, we assembled ancient DNA from 435 individuals, demonstrating three genetic clines.

A Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end and a northern end at Berezhnovka along the lower Volga river.

Bidirectional gene flow created intermediate populations, such as the north Caucasus Maikop people, and those at Remontnoye on the steppe. The Volga cline was formed as CLV people mixed with upriver populations of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, creating hypervariable groups, including one at Khvalynsk.

The Dnipro cline was formed when CLV people moved west, mixing with people with Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry along the Dnipro and Don rivers to establish Serednii Stih groups, from whom Yamnaya ancestors formed around 4000 bc and grew rapidly after 3750–3350 bc. The CLV people contributed around four-fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and, entering Anatolia, probably from the east, at least one-tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, who spoke Hittite.

We therefore propose that the final unity of the speakers of ‘proto-Indo-Anatolian’, the language ancestral to both Anatolian and Indo-European people, occurred in CLV people some time between 4400 bc and 4000 bc."

From the abstract (2):

"The North Pontic Region was the meeting point of the farmers of Old Europe and the foragers and pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe, and the source of migrations deep into Europe.

Here we report genome-wide data from 81 prehistoric North Pontic individuals to understand the genetic makeup of its people. North Pontic foragers had ancestry from Balkan and Eastern hunter-gatherers as well as European farmers and, occasionally, Caucasus hunter-gatherers.

During the Eneolithic period, a wave of migrants from the Caucasus–Lower Volga area bypassed local foragers to mix in equal parts with Trypillian farmers, forming the people of the Usatove culture around 4500 bce.

A temporally overlapping wave of migrants from the Caucasus–Lower Volga blended with foragers instead of farmers to form Serednii Stih people.

The third wave was the Yamna—descendants of the Serednii Stih who formed by mixture around 4000 bce and expanded during the Early Bronze Age (3300 bce). The temporal gap between Serednii Stih and the Yamna is bridged by a genetically Yamna individual from Mykhailivka, Ukraine (3635–3383 bce), a site of archaeological continuity across the Eneolithic–Bronze Age transition and a likely epicentre of Yamna formation.

Each of these three waves of migration propagated distinctive ancestries while also incorporating outsiders, a flexible strategy that may explain the success of the peoples of the North Pontic in spreading their genes and culture across Eurasia."

Landmark studies track source of Indo-European languages— Harvard Gazette "Researchers place Caucasus Lower Volga people, speakers of ancestor tongue, in today’s Russia about 6,500 years ago"

The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans (no public access)

A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (no public access)

Genetic reconstruction of the ancestry of Pontic-Caspian steppe and West Asian populations points to four key locations.

Songbirds may 'talk' to other bird species of similar kind as they migrate during the night

Amazing stuff!

"A study of thousands of hours of flight calls suggests that songbirds may be forming social connections with other species as they migrate, possibly even exchanging information about the journey. ...

Last year, the co-authors found that birds across northeastern North America “buddy up” with other species at stopover sites during migration. Their new findings suggest that social relationships between songbird species are also important during migratory flights. ..."

"Songbirds, such as warblers, thrushes, orioles and sparrows, tend to migrate at night when the air is calmer, cooler and there are fewer predators lurking about. But the songbird flight paths may not be entirely instinctive, according to new research. Evidence from over 18,300 hours of recorded flight calls suggests songbirds may 'talk' to other species as they migrate, forming social connections and, perhaps, exchanging information about the journey. ..."

From the highlights and abstract:

"Highlights

• Migrating songbirds associate socially with other species during nighttime flights

• Associations are stronger among species with similar calls and flight speeds

• Social information could play an underrecognized role in nocturnal bird migration

Summary

An emerging frontier in ecology explores how organisms integrate social information into movement behavior and the extent to which information exchange occurs across species boundaries.

Most migratory landbirds are thought to undertake nocturnal migratory flights independently, guided by endogenous programs and individual experience.

Little research has addressed the potential for social information exchange aloft during nocturnal migration, but social influences that aid navigation, orientation, or survival could be valuable during high-risk migration periods.

We captured audio of >18,000 h of nocturnal bird migration and used deep learning to extract >175,000 in-flight vocalizations of 27 species of North American landbirds. We used vocalizations to test whether migrating birds distribute non-randomly relative to other species in flight, accounting for migration phenology, geography, and other non-social factors.

We found that migrants engaged in distinct associations with an average of 2.7 ± 1.9 SD other species. Social associations were stronger among species with similar wing morphologies and vocalizations. These results suggest that vocal signals maintain in-flight associations that are structured by flight speed and behavior.

For small-bodied and short-lived bird species, transient social associations could play an important role in migratory decision-making by supplementing endogenous or experiential information sources.

This research provides the first quantitative evidence of interspecific social associations during nocturnal bird migration, supporting recent calls to rethink songbird migration with a social lens. Substantial recent declines in bird populations may diminish the frequency and strength of social associations during migration, with currently unknown consequences for populations."

Songbirds may 'talk' to other species as they migrate

Songbirds socialize on the wing during migration, new study says (original news release)

Social associations across species during nocturnal bird migration (no public access)

Ancient genomes during the Bronze Age provide insights on Indo-European linguistic origins and divergence

Amazing stuff!

"A team of 91 researchers—including famed geneticist Eske Willerslev at the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Center, University of Copenhagen—has discovered a Bronze Age genetic divergence connected to eastern and western Mediterranean Indo-European language speakers.

Findings indicate that Spanish, French and Italian populations received steppe ancestry from Bell Beaker groups, while Greek and Armenian groups acquired ancestry directly from Yamnaya populations. Their results are consistent with the Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian linguistic models. ...

 researchers analyzed 314 ancient genomes to clarify the trajectories of steppe-related populations and the possible origins of languages such as Italic, Celtic, Greek and Armenian. ...

Ancient genomes from Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Moldova, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, all dated between 2,100 and 5,200 years ago, were sequenced and combined with previously published ancient genomes for a total of 2,403 samples. Steppe ancestry sources were compared using identity-by-descent admixture modeling. To assess mobility within populations, 224 individuals underwent strontium isotope analyses. ...

Steppe ancestry in Greece and Armenia was derived directly from Yamnaya populations of the Pontic steppe without significant admixture of locals. ..."

From the abstract:

"The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious. It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of steppe-related genetic ancestry from the onset of the Bronze Age. However, multiple steppe-derived populations co-existed in Europe during this period, and it remains unclear how these populations diverged and which provided the demographic channels for the ancestral forms of the Italic, Celtic, Greek, and Armenian languages. To investigate the ancestral histories of Indo-European-speaking groups in Southern Europe, we sequenced genomes from 314 ancient individuals from the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, spanning from 5,200 BP to 2,100 BP, and co-analysed these with published genome data. We additionally conducted strontium isotope analyses on 224 of these individuals. We find a deep east-west divide of steppe ancestry in Southern Europe during the Bronze Age. Specifically, we show that the arrival of steppe ancestry in Spain, France, and Italy was mediated by Bell Beaker (BB) populations of Western Europe, likely contributing to the emergence of the Italic and Celtic languages. In contrast, Armenian and Greek populations acquired steppe ancestry directly from Yamnaya groups of Eastern Europe. These results are consistent with the linguistic Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian hypotheses accounting for the origins of most Mediterranean Indo-European languages of Classical Antiquity. Our findings thus align with specific linguistic divergence models for the Indo-European language family while contradicting others. This underlines the power of ancient DNA in uncovering prehistoric diversifications of human populations and language communities."

Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European linguistic origins

Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages (open access)

Why is bromance masculine

If you consult leading English dictionaries, then you will find something like "a close, friendly, but not sexual relationship between two men."

So only men can bond?

Or is there a similar word English for when women bond?

So there is no bromance between a man and a woman? That is not romantic!