Proto-Tungusic in time and space

Although there is a general consensus among historical comparative linguists that
the Tungusic languages are genealogically related and descend from a common
ancestral language, the internal structure of the family, its age, homeland and
prehistoric cultural context remain subject to debate. In addition to four competing
concepts of classification, the linguistic literature yields a wide range of time
estimations for the family covering more than a millennium as well as four different
proposals with regard to the location of the homeland covering Eastern Siberia
and Manchuria. Here we will combine the power of traditional comparative
historical linguistics and computational phylogenetics to shed light on the prehistory
of the Tungusic languages. Our aim is to build on a recent Bayesian verification
of the Tungusic family and examine its implications in determining a plausible
time depth, location and cultural context of the ancestral proto-Tungusic speech
community. We will compare spatial inferences based on two different
statistically well-supported Tungusic classifications, namely one in which the break-up of
Manchuric constitutes the first split in the family as well as a North-South
classification with a northern branch including Even, Evenki, Negidal, Oroqen, Solon, Oroch
and Udehe as opposed to a southern branch including Manchuric and Nanaic
languages. Situating Proto-Tungusic in time and space, we will estimate the break-up
of Proto-Tungusic in the beginning of the first millennium and place its homeland
in the area around Lake Khanka. Our study pushes the field forward in answering
some tantalizing questions about the prehistory of the Tungusic family, providing a
quantitative basis for some conflicting hypotheses and in triangulating linguistics,
archaeology and genetics into a holistic approach to the Tungusic past.