Eastern Himalaya: The Cradle of Ethnogenesis by George van Driem
3:00 pm • 13 July 2014 (Sunday) • Hotel Annapurna, Durbar Marg
The eastern half of the 3600 km Himalayan range, from the Kali Gandaki River all the way to Yunnan and Sichuan, is a region of pivotal importance in population prehistory. As a cradle of ethnogenesis, this region served both as staging area and principal thoroughfare in the populating of much of Asia following the emergence of anatomically modern humans in Africa. New scientific insights from different disciplines enable us to reconstruct the dispersal of a number of major language families in Asia and Oceania. These insights help dispel two antiquated scholarly themes, one of which still lives on in the popular imagination and another which survives in some slow-moving quarters of the linguistic community.