Methods used in evolutionary biology show how people spread across the continent, giving birth to new languages
A myth in Australia says that a woman named Warramurrungunji emerged from the sea and that she created children as she moved across the landscape. Warramurrungunji told each child to speak an specific language. This myth has more reason than it seems, in the sense that the peopling and language origins of Australia are closely entwined. Researchers have long puzzled over both. When Europeans colonized Australia 250 years ago, the continent was home to an estimated half-million to 2 million people who were organized into about 700 different grops and spoke at least 300 languages.
Linguits have struggled to work out how these languages were related and when they emerged, but unfortunately each one was spoken by relatively few people and many of them vanished before they could be studied. In recent years researchers have begun to unravel the Australian linguistic puzzle, and this week the approach takes a major step forward, with a combined genetic and linguistic study of the largest Australian language family, led by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, and published in this week´s issue of Nature.
