Abstract
Culture evolves in ways that are analogous to, but distinct from, genetic evolution. Previous studies have demonstrated correlations between genetic and cultural diversity at small scales within language families, but few studies have empirically investigated parallels between genetic and cultural evolution across multiple language families using a diverse range of cultural data. Here we report an analysis comparing cultural and genetic data from 13 populations from in and around Northeast Asia spanning 10 different language families/isolates. We construct distance matrices for language (grammar, phonology, lexicon), music (song structure, performance style), and genomes (genome-wide SNPs) and test for correlations among them. After controlling for spatial autocorrelation and recent contact, robust correlations emerge between genetic and grammatical distances. Our results suggest that grammatical structure might be one of the strongest cultural indicators of human population history, while also demonstrating differences among cultural and genetic relationships that highlight the complex nature of human cultural and genetic evolution.
Significance Statement Comparing cultural traits to the genetic relationships of populations can reveal the extent to which cultural diversification reflects population history. To date, this approach has been mostly used to compare genetic relationships with the linguistic relationships that hold within language families, thereby limiting time depth to considerably less than 10,000 years. Here, we compare the genetic relationships of 13 populations in and around Northeast Asia to linguistic and musical relationships spanning different language families, thereby probing potential effects of population history at deeper time depths. We find that after controlling for geography, similarities in grammatical relationships reflect genetic relationships, suggesting that grammatical structure captures deep-time population history.
