Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat

In what is sure to be a more cited paper than Gould and Lewontin (1979), Douglas Ochs at Columbia University, together with a team of internationally renowned scientists (and probably a few internationally unknown graduate students), has found that all of humanity can be traced back to a large Pliocene-era goat.

More interesting, for this blog at least, is the finding that the roots of early Indo-European language were in goat bleating. Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down the actual paper myself to find the details of this argument, but if you’re interested, I would suggest looking at the original article where I found this wonderful and groundbreaking study, on the popular peer-reviewed site the Onion.

Full disclosure: This post has been listed in the Irrelevant and Irreverent category, because it probably fits there. We’re not seriously suggesting that humans do in fact go back to a single large goat species in the Pliocene – that’s much too early. Rather, it’s more likely that the goat species was around in the Silurian period. It feasted mainly on trilobites.

Author: Richard

I am computational linguistics student at the University of Saarland; my undergraduate in Linguistics was at the University of Edinburgh. I am interested in evolutionary linguistics, particularly involving Bayesian phylogenetics, typology, and computer simulations. I am also interested in data management, web development, open documentation, and scientific workflows. My undergraduate thesis focused on the evolution and significance of word segmentation. View all posts by Richard