MBA Students Lead Global Sustainability Summit

Students from 26 peer schools met to track environmental concerns and potential solutions at an annual conference hosted this year at Texas McCombs.

Global business innovation took center stage when nearly 300 MBA students from around the world convened at The University of Texas at Austin in February to talk through the risks and opportunities of climate change.

MBA students from the McCombs School of Business hosted this year’s ClimateCAP, the annual Global MBA Summit on Climate, Capital, and Business, after winning a competitive bid among MBA programs nationwide.

The fifth annual event drew MBA students from 26 schools and sold out in less than two hours, with a waitlist more than 200 students long.

These future leaders are recognizing that sustainability needs to be part of any business strategy, said Alexis Greco, a second-year MBA student and ClimateCAP co-chair.

“Every single MBA will have to be aware of it,” she said. “It’s not just the ideological thing to do. It’s the right business move.”

Event speakers concurred: “This is, hands down, the most exciting time in our industry and the most rapid pace of change,” said Rebecca Kujawa, president and CEO of NextEra Energy Resources, who spoke on stage with Michael Webber, deputy director of UT’s Energy Institute, about massive shifts in the utilities game and her own journey into renewables.

Having passion for the work fuels progress, Kujawa added. “When things don’t go well, perseverance makes a huge difference in whether or not you excel. In our industry there’s lots of turns and twists, and so passion and perseverance are critically important.”

For solving the complex problems of the climate crisis, keynote speaker Ron Gonen advised students to take the long view.

“Progress is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight,” said Gonen, founder and CEO of Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm focused on the “circular economy” — the movement to redesign products to be more durable, reusable, repairable, and recyclable. “You’ve got to commit and have a sense of urgency while also being patient.”

Other keynote speakers included McCombs alumni Paul Knopp, MBA ’83, CEO of KPMG U.S. Advisory Services; Ray Cameron, BBA ’88, BlackRock Inc.’s managing director and head of corporate client strategy for the Americas; and Jane Ewing, senior vice president for sustainability at Walmart.

Nineteen of the 50 speakers were UT alumni, and nine were Texas McCombs graduates — evidence of the school’s legacy role in the sustainability space, said summit co-chair Patrick McPadden.

“McCombs has always bred innovators, and environmental challenges have given students and alumni another channel for these skills,” he said.

The conference aims to prepare MBA students to build or lead climate-resilient businesses, and for many of the students who attended, it was a first look at the business implications of climate. The effects are sweeping, and they affect every area of a company, from finance to marketing.

Sessions explored agriculture and food systems, powering business and transformation, the circular economy, innovation for the built environment, financing, net-zero goals and ESG reporting, scaling breakthrough technology, and hard-to-decarbonize industries.

“This conference is a way to speak to the people who don’t see themselves as climate evangelists but know this will impact their career,” said co-chair Samantha Hea, who oversaw programming. “Very selfishly from an MBA student perspective, it’s a way to be well-prepared for our own careers.”

Texas McCombs’ Global Sustainability Leadership Institute was a founding partner of the ClimateCAP consortium of schools and has sent students to the conference every year.

After winning the opportunity to host, Texas McCombs students worked with the institute to raise nearly $300,000 — two-thirds of it in cash — and spent many hours inviting nearly 50 speakers, building the program, mapping logistics, and attracting sponsors.

“This student-directed initiative was a natural fit for us, and we were thrilled to help students organize this year’s event,” said Meeta Kothare, managing director for the institute. “The speakers and panelists gave MBA students an in-depth look at sustainability challenges they’ll face when they step into business leadership roles. But the takeaway message was one of hope: that thoughtful, innovative organizations will be part of the solution.”

Attendance at the summit has grown every year since its inception in 2018 at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, even as the urgency of climate change is creating business opportunities never seen before, McPadden said.

He said many people with MBAs see sustainability as a way to marry executive ambitions with purpose. “If people can leave ClimateCAP thinking, ‘I can have a cool career, and it can be mission-driven work that feels really relevant to me,’ I think it’s a huge accomplishment.”

Texas McCombs Dean Lillian Mills, who gave opening remarks, applauded the impact of this student-run event. “This worthwhile effort is further proof of our students’ trail-blazing spirit, and it was exciting to see MBAs across the globe imagine a future together,” she said. “Their passion makes me proud to know that we have a generation rising to confront the challenges of the 21st century.”

Story by Sally Parker

360-million-year-old Irish fossil provides oldest evidence of plant self-defense in wood

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

 

IMAGE: MICROSCOPIC OBSERVATION OF A SECTION OF DEVONIAN FOSSIL WOOD CONTAINING TYLOSES AND DETAIL OF AN AREA SHOWING SEVERAL TYLOSES (ARROWS) PRODUCED BY PARENCHYMA CELLS (P) INSIDE A CONDUCTOR CELL (C); SCALE: 0.05 MM (50 ΜM). PHOTOS: A-L DECOMBEIX. view more 

CREDIT: A-L DECOMBEIX.

An international team of scientists, co-led by Dr Carla J. Harper, Assistant Professor in Botany in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity, has discovered the oldest evidence of plant self-defence in wood in a 360-million-year-old fossil from south-eastern Ireland.

Plants can protect their wood from infection and water loss by forming special structures called “tyloses”. These prevent bacterial and fungal pathogens from getting into the heartwood of living trees and damaging it. However, it was not previously known how early in the evolution of plants woody species became capable of forming such defences. 

Published today in Nature Plants is the oldest evidence of tylosis formation from Late Devonian (360-million-year-old) fossil wood from the Hook Head Peninsula area, Co. Wexford, Ireland.

These plants lived well before the time of the dinosaurs or even flying insects. They formed the first primeval forests, when plants ruled the continents, accompanied by microorganisms, fungi, and early relatives of spiders, millipedes and centipedes.

Dr Harper and her team, including Dr Anne-Laure Decombeix (CNRS, France), Dr Cyrille Prestianni (Uni. Liège, Belgium), Trinity Botany PhD student Thibault Durieux (co-advised by Harper and Decombeix), Merlin Ramel (INRAe, France), and Prof Michael Krings (BSGP, Munich, Germany and Trinity SNS Visiting Research Associate), discovered tyloses in the fossilised wood of an extinct group of plants known as the Archaeopteridalean progymnosperms. These plants are particularly important as they were the first trees to resemble those we see today, with a large woody trunk, branches, and complex root systems.  

The team has now discovered that these primitive trees were also able to form tyloses to protect their wood. What is particularly exciting is that Ireland is one of the few places in the world where such details can be observed in plants from this remote time period. This means that the fossils from Co. Wexford give unique insights into this important period in plant evolution. 

Dr Harper said: “Fossil wood is an example of an anatomically preserved fossil: plant remains that have been infiltrated by a water rich in minerals, preserving their tissues in three dimensions. These fossils allow us to study very fine details of extinct plant anatomy, down to the cellular level. This type of preservation, in general, is rare but occurs in certain fossil deposits in Ireland.

“Continuing fieldwork in Irish Devonian localities will yield new fossils that will increase our understanding of the diversity and biology of extinct plants. Overall, Ireland’s rich plant fossil history – an untapped resource – plays a key role in answering exciting research questions and raises many more.” 

Ireland has long been known as the Emerald Isle due its famous rolling green hills—but such discoveries help us to understand how and when this “greening” began. 

Dr Harper said: “By studying these fossil plants and their past environments, we can get powerful insights into the history of plant physiological processes that still occur today, and into both current and future ecosystems of Ireland and the world.” 

The journal article can be read on the publisher's website.

To learn more about this research see a new blog post on the Nature website. 

This research was funded by the Irish Research Council Ulysses 2021 Grant 17056, Irish Research Council and French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a Trinity College Dublin Ph.D. Provost Award.

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JOURNAL

Nature Plants

DOI

10.1038/s41477-023-01394-0 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

New study uncovers Colorado’s spicy ancient history of chili peppers

A case of “the chicken or the chili pepper?" and coming to grips with a new timeline

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER

 

IMAGE: CU BOULDER’S ROCÍO DEANNA AND ABEL CAMPOS IDENTIFIED THIS CHILI PEPPER FOSSIL IN THE CU BOULDER MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS BY THE UNIQUE SHAPE OF ITS CALYX TEETH: SPIKES ON THE END OF THE FRUITING STEM THAT HOLD ON TO THE PEPPER. view more 

CREDIT: R. DEANNA

Botanists and paleontologists, led by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, have identified a fossil chili pepper that may rewrite the geography and evolutionary timeline of the tomato plant family.

The team’s findings, published last month in the journal New Phytologist, show that the chili pepper tribe (Capsiceae) within the tomato, or nightshade (Solanaceae), family is much older and was much more widespread than previously thought. Scientists previously believed that chili peppers evolved in South America at most 15 million years ago, but the new research pushes that date to at least 50 million years ago—and suggests that chili peppers were in fact present in North America at that time.

Rocío Deanna, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology, and Abel Campos, an undergraduate double majoring in evolutionary biology and molecular, cellular and developmental biology, weren't planning to rewrite history when they met up one afternoon at the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History in 2021. Yet among a group of specimens in its collections gathered from the Green River Formation—geological treasure trove in northwestern Colorado and southwestern Wyoming—Deanna spotted a specific, solanaceous trait embedded in one fossil: little spikes on the end of a fruiting stem.

“At first, I thought ‘No way! This can’t be true,’” said Rocío Deanna, lead author of the study. “But it was so characteristic of the chili pepper.”

After they discovered two of these fossils in the CU Boulder collections, Deanna and Campos, a co-author of the study, found one more from the chili pepper tribe in collections at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. All three fossils are from the Green River Formation in Colorado: the CU specimens from Garfield County and the DMNS fossil from Rio Blanco County.

These chili pepper fossils from the Eocene geological epoch (34 to 56 million years ago) match the timeline of another nightshade fossil found in the Esmeraldas Formation in Colombia, revealing that the family was already distributed across all of the Americas by as early as 50 million years ago.

“The family is way older than we thought,” said Deanna, also a faculty member at the National University of Cordoba.

A chili pepper fossil from the CU Boulder collections.

CREDIT

S. Manchester

A fruit-fossil history

The nightshade family comprises 3,000 species and almost 100 different genera, including chili peppers. The ancient chili pepper was technically a fruit—and a berry, at that. While tomatoes and peppers are commonly associated with vegetables, they have seeds on the inside, which officially categorizes them as fruits.

The researchers cannot be sure of the chili’s exact shape or color, but it was probably on the smaller end compared to modern day chili peppers. And like its relatives, it could have been quite spicy, according to Deanna.

Deanna and Campos identified the fossil by the unique shape of its calyx teeth: spikes on the end of the fruiting stem that hold on to the pepper, like those which hold a gemstone in a ring.

“The world has maybe 300,000 plant species. The only plants with that kind of calyx is this group of 80 or 90 species,” said Stacey Smith, senior author of the paper and associate professor of evolutionary biology at CU Boulder.

Paleontologists collected the CU Boulder fossil from the Green River Formation in the 1990s. But its exact identity remained a mystery for years, in part because there are only a handful of “solanologists,” botanists who study the nightshade family, in the world. When Deanna found these Colorado-based fossils, she had just returned from a global search for tomato family fossil specimens, only to find some “just ripe for the picking” right on campus.

“A lot of discoveries happen decades after the specimens have been collected,” said Smith. “Who knows how many other new fossil species are sitting in any of these museums? They're just waiting for the right eyes to look at them.”

Rocío Deanna, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology, examines a chili pepper fossil in the CU Boulder collections.

CREDIT

R. Deanna

Trickle-down evolution

These chili pepper fossils were around during the Eocene, a geologic epoch that lasted from about 34 to 56 million years ago as the continents drifted toward their present positions. During this balmy time in Earth’s history, carbon dioxide levels ranged between 700 and 900 parts per million (twice as high as they are today), and palm trees grew as far north as Alaska. Because little to no ice was present on Earth, sea level was as much as 500 feet higher than it is today.

Scientists had assumed that the origins of chili peppers began in South America roughly 10 to 15 million years ago, where they then dispersed over land and water to the other continents. While Colorado today is home to very few native nightshades and no chili peppers, this new discovery hints that a plethora of plants from the tomato plant family may have existed in North America 40 to 50 million years ago, which have since largely disappeared.

But how did these peppers first get to North America? It’s now a case of “the chicken or the chili pepper?”

Experts have theorized that fruit-eating birds, which existed as early as 60 million years ago, may have carried seeds and plants around the world with them in their guts, stuck to their feathers or in the mud on their feet. But these birds also had to be eating something to fuel their journeys—and fleshy berries, or peppers, make the perfect fuel. Birds may have distributed peppers from continent to continent, but peppers may also have been crucial to the success of those same birds.

So the nightshade family could have easily started in North America instead of South America, then dispersed in the other direction—and with this discovery, scientists can no longer say for sure, said Smith.

“These chili peppers, a species that we thought arose in an evolutionary blink of an eye, have been around for a super long time,” said Smith. “We're still coming to grips with this new timeline.”

Additional authors on this publication include: Camila Martínez, Universidad EAFIT and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute; Steven Manchester, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida; Peter Wilf, Pennsylvania State University; Sandra Knapp, Natural History Museum, London; Franco E. Chiarini, Gloria E. Barboza, and Gabriel Bernardello of the Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biologia Vegetal, IMBIV (CONICET-UNC); Herve Sauquet, National Herbarium of New South Wales and Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, University of New South Wales; Ellen Dean, Center for Plant Diversity, University of California; Andres Orejuela, Grupo de Investigacion en Recursos Naturales Amazonicos – GRAM, Facultad de Ingenierıas y Ciencias Basicas, Instituto Tecnol ogico del Putumayo, and Subdireccion cientıfica, Jardın Botanico de Bogota Jose Celestino Mutis.

Abel Campos, majoring in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, examines a fossil in the Invertebrate Paleontology department at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

CREDIT

Casey A. Cass / University of Colorado Boulder

JOURNAL

New Phytologist

DOI

10.1111/nph.18904 

ARTICLE TITLE

Fossil berries reveal global radiation of the nightshade family by the early Cenozoic

What was the agriculture like in southeast China in Late Neolithic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS

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IMAGE: 3D MODEL OF MAJOR CHARRED PLANT REMAINS IDENTIFIED AT THE JINGSHUIDUN SITE. (A) LAYER 25, CHENOPODIACEAE CARYOPSIS; (B)LAYER 27, SOLANACEAE CARYOPSIS; (C) LAYER 27, RICE CARYOPSIS; (D) LAYER 32, FABACEAE CARYOPSIS; (E)1–4: LAYER 25, 5: LAYER 26, FOXTAIL MILLET CARYOPSIS view more 

CREDIT: HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS LIMITED COMPANY

The emergence and spread of agriculture in the Neolithic had a revolutionary impact on the development of human society, and it provided a solid economic basis for the origin and development of human civilization. In southern China, the original crop was rice, but over time, millet cultivation gradually spread. Affected by these various environmental and social developmental factors, there are still many issues about spatiotemporal detail of agriculture development in southern Anhui Province, China, with most information currently deriving from historical documents and rather limited archeological evidence.

The study, looked at data of the archeobotanical remains at the Jingshuidun site in the mountainous areas of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in southern Anhui Province. This work was carried out by the research team of Wu Yan, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, entitled “The history of agriculture in the mountainous areas of the lower Yangtze River since the late Neolithic” is published online in Frontiers of Earth Science on 2022.

The study site of Jingshuidun (31°48 '3"N, 117°11′ 50" E), located at the intersection of the lower reaches Yangtze River Plain and the mountainous area in southern Anhui Province, preserves thick archeological strata and a rare superpositional relationship of multiple occupational periods, allowing for the study of cultural stages and archaeobotany.

The authors noted that macrobotanical remains and phytoliths of domesticated rice are present in layers at the Jingshuidun site dated to 4874–4820 cal. yr B.P. (middle-late Liangzhu Period) and 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P. (late Western Zhou Dynasty to the early Spring and Autumn Period). Moreover, macrobotanical remains and phytoliths from the site document the earliest remains of foxtail millet (Setaria italica) in southern Anhui Province, from a layer dating to the late Western Zhou Dynasty and the early Spring and Autumn Period (2667–2568 cal. yr B.P.). These results suggest that the people occupying the Jingshuidun site used single rice farming as far back as 4874–4820 cal. yr B.P., and they began to plant millet by at least 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P., documenting the spread of millet agriculture to the southern area by that time.

The study also showed that there were many traces of carbonized millet remains in layers dated to 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P. in the Jingshuidun site, which is the earliest direct dating of millet remains in southern Anhui. Evidence of macrobotanical remains at the Jingshuidun site shows that dry cultivation techniques from northern China had spread to southern Anhui by 2667–2568 cal. yr B.P., and that mixed cultivation of rice and millet occurred. It may be caused by the migration of ancient people and the change of climate.

The analyses of their study on macrobotanical remains and phytoliths also formed the basis for the reconstruction of the subsistence economy of ancient humans at the Jingshuidun site from the late Neolithic to early historical times. They can obtain a clearer picture of the development of rice and millet agriculture in the southern Anhui Province region, as well as the spread of millet cultivation, when combined their dates with that of the previous archeobotanical work. It provides new evidence for further understanding of agricultural development and the transmission route of Millet in southern Anhui since the late Neolithic period.

 

Cite this article

Wang, J., Chen, X., Zhang, G. et al. The history of agriculture in the mountainous areas of the lower Yangtze River since the late Neolithic. Front. Earth Sci. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-021-0956-z

 

About Researcher

Wu Yan, young professor. Innovative research achievements have been made focusing on the use of phytolith methods to carry out the origin and spread of agriculture, the utilization of ancient human plants and the feeding habits and evolution of herbivores. 

 

About Frontiers of Earth Science

Frontiers of Earth Science publishes original, peer-reviewed, theoretical and experimental frontier research papers as well as significant review articles of more general interest to earth scientists. The journal features articles dealing with observations, patterns, processes, and modeling of both innerspheres (including deep crust, mantle, and core) and outerspheres (including atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere) of the earth. Its aim is to promote communication and share knowledge among the international earth science communities.

 

About Higher Education Press

Founded in May 1954, Higher Education Press Limited Company (HEP), affiliated with the Ministry of Education, is one of the earliest institutions committed to educational publishing after the establishment of P. R. China in 1949. After striving for six decades, HEP has developed into a major comprehensive publisher, with products in various forms and at different levels. Both for import and export, HEP has been striving to fill in the gap of domestic and foreign markets and meet the demand of global customers by collaborating with more than 200 partners throughout the world and selling products and services in 32 languages globally. Now, HEP ranks among China's top publishers in terms of copyright export volume and the world's top 50 largest publishing enterprises in terms of comprehensive strength.

The Frontiers Journals series published by HEP includes 28 English academic journals, covering the largest academic fields in China at present. Among the series, 13 have been indexed by SCI, 6 by EI, 2 by MEDLINE, 1 by A&HCI. HEP's academic monographs have won about 300 different kinds of publishing funds and awards both at home and abroad.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers of Earth Science

DOI

10.1007/s11707-021-0956-z 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The history of agriculture in the mountainous areas of the lower Yangtze River since the late Neolithic

New paper advances understanding of geographic health disparities

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

By looking at where people were born instead of where they ultimately move to and die, geographic disparities in mortality look different than previously assumed, according to a new study published on April 1, 2023, in the journal Demography.

interstate migration may mitigate regional inequalities in mortality according to “Understanding Geographic Disparities in Mortality,” a paper led by Jason Fletcher, professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of the Center for Demography of Health and Aging with an appointment in Population Health Sciences.

“At a time when nearly a third of Americans die in a state they were not born in, it is important to consider how calculating geographic disparities in life expectancy does not only reflect the overall health of a region,” says Fletcher. “It also reflects migration patterns.”

Fletcher and his team of researchers were able to reconceptualize this important demographic measure by analyzing a sample of nearly 1.5 million individuals from the newly available Mortality Disparities in American Communities data set, which links respondents in the 2008 American Community Survey to official death records from the National Death Index. The currently available mortality follow-up period extends until Dec. 31, 2015.

By looking at state of birth instead of state of residence, all states except Minnesota in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions of the U.S. have higher life expectancy measures. The opposite is true for almost all states in the southeastern region of the country, which already had the lowest life expectancies by state of residence.

For five states in the Southeast, male life expectancy of transplants to the state is more than two years higher than that of people born in the state who still lived there at the time of the 2008 survey used in the study.

The patterns for women are similar, but differences are slightly smaller in magnitude. This gender difference could be because the overall migration rate is higher for men than for women.

This new method of assessing regional life expectancy also demonstrates that interstate migration is not as simple as people selecting destinations based on health environments. Instead, states lose healthy residents to other states while they also gain healthy transplants.

The net effect differs widely across states but is clustered by region. For example, in many southern states, the mortality risk of transplants is much lower than the mortality risk of people who have remained in their home state. In many states in the Northeast and Midwest, the mortality risk of these two subgroups is similar.

However, migration patterns reduce these regional disparities, making them less visible in nearly all previous research on this topic that used state of residence in their measurements.

The Population Association of America featured this paper in the lead-up to their 2023 Annual Meeting in New Orleans from April 12-15, 2023.

Fletcher is a leader in the emerging field of social genomics, and this new paper is part of a larger research agenda that connects early life conditions and mortality. He was recently awarded the prestigious 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to further this research.

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JOURNAL

Demography

DOI

10.1215/00703370-10609710 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Understanding Geographic Disparities in Mortality

World’s largest grammar database reveals accelerating loss of language diversity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER

There’s a crisis unfolding in the field of linguistics: Global language experts estimate that, without intervention, about one language will be lost every month for the next 40 years.

A study published in Science Advances debuts a grammatical database that documents the enormous diversity of current languages on the planet, highlighting just how much humanity stands to lose and why it's worth saving. 

Known as Grambank, it is now the world’s largest publicly available comparative grammatical database. Initiated by scholars in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, more than 100 authors from 68 institutions, including the University of Colorado Boulder, contributed to the years-long, global data project.

The analysis of more than 400,000 data points and 2,400 separate languages and dialects reveals that language loss is occurring unevenly across major linguistic regions of the world, with indigenous languages in northeast South America, Alaska to Oregon, and in northern Australia at highest risk.

“Grambank is showing us the importance of working on language documentation and revitalization in order to preserve this legacy of human communication, culture and cognition,” said Hannah Haynie, co-first author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at CU Boulder.

Grammar 101

Grammar is simply the rules of a language: the words and sounds used, and how they are combined and interpreted. Grammatical elements of a language include word order (if the subject goes before or after the verb), tense (present, the past or future), comparatives (words that express ‘bigger’ or ‘smaller’) and whether a language has gendered pronouns.

Over the past century, many researchers have studied languages, worked with their speakers, and published books or other types of grammatical descriptions of languages. Grambank is built both on these research analyses and prior language databases, but compared with previous databases, it is larger in scale and more thorough. It encodes 195 possible grammatical features for about 215 language families.

“Our understanding of grammar and what that tells us about humans is limited by what we can observe,” said Haynie. “We're putting those observations into this data set, and that allows for comparison.”

As there are currently about 4,300 languages with published grammatical descriptions—out of about 7,000 known languages in the modern world—Grambank is over halfway to encoding all possible grammar information that can be extracted from existing data sources, said Haynie.

“Unusual” languages

Using Grambank, the team found that they could identify “unusual” languages: those which stray further from the averages in variation typically found in language, which often have no known sister languages. But they also found that there’s nothing particularly unusual about endangered languages compared with those that are not endangered.

“A lot of fairly ordinary languages, in terms of their basic grammar, happen to be endangered for a variety of reasons,” said Haynie.

English, spoken around the world by 1.5 billion people, is actually “a pretty weird language” by Grambank’s standards.

“Some of the places with more ‘unusual’ languages are places like Europe and Northern Africa—languages that we, as English speakers, tend to be more familiar with,” said Haynie.

The bigger takeaway for Haynie is that none of the languages in the dataset are identical. Of all 2,400 languages and dialects in the dataset, only five match up the same using the grammatical code used to document and analyze them within Grambank. Though vocabulary may play a big role in the mutual unintelligibility that linguists rely on to determine what counts as separate languages, Grambank shows that the grammatical ‘fingerprints’ of languages are also typically unique, she said.

“It means that every language is pretty darn special,” said Haynie.

Language loss

Language extinction has occurred throughout human history, but its speed has been accelerating due to social, political and economic pressures, said Haynie.

It’s as if, while mapping the human genome, scientists saw the genes themselves rapidly disappearing before their eyes.

“Right now we're at a critical state, in terms of language endangerment,” said Haynie, noting that the United Nations has declared this the International Decade of Indigenous Languages to try to promote language preservation, documentation and revitalization.

This global language loss is also not evenly distributed. Several regions are at higher risk of losing indigenous languages, such as Aleut in Alaska and Salish languages of the Pacific Northwest, Yagua and Tariana spoken in South America, and the languages of Kuuk-Thayorre and Wardaman native to Northern Australian communities.

“Indigenous languages here in North America, languages around us and on our continent, are some of the most endangered languages in the world,” she said.

Genealogy versus geography

One element that has been “hotly debated” within linguistics for years is the relationship between genealogy and geography in the development of language. That is: Which features in language are inherited from family and culture (genealogy) and which are more likely to be shared through contact among neighbors (geography)?

The Grambank analysis found that genealogy seems to be consistently more important than geography—meaning that the faithful inheritance of ancestral language plays a stronger role in shaping grammar in languages still spoken today than who someone’s geographical neighbors were and how they talked, said Haynie.

While language crossover and bilingualism are well documented throughout history, this finding showcases how there is much we can still learn about human history and the ways we communicate in present day from the words of our ancestors.

“Language always finds a way,” said Haynie.

The Grambank database is an open-access comprehensive resource maintained by the Max Planck Society.

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adg6175 

ARTICLE TITLE

Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-Apr-2023