Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 467  George van Driem The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory The greater Himalayan region, including the Tibetan plateau in the north and the Gangetic plain in the south, served as the principal prehistoric tho- roughfare for the peopling of East and Southeast Asia. The descendants of ancient migrants through this region ultimately settled lands as far away as New Zealand, Madagascar, Lappland and the Americas. Several of the keys to understanding the ethnogenesis of human diversity in Asia include the Fa- ther Tongue correlation, possible refugia during the Last Glacial Maximum and the hypothesis that language families may have arisen as the result of de- mographic bottlenecks in prehistory. Ethnolinguistically informed inferences based on Asian Y chromosomal phylogeography permit a reconstruction of episodes of ethnolinguistic prehistory which lie beyond the linguistic event horizon, i. e. beyond the time depth empirically accessible to historical lin- guistics. The origins of the language families which make up the hypotheti- cal Uralo-Siberian and East Asian linguistic phyla are argued to have lain in the Eastern Himalayan corridor. Several other Asian language families are shown to be tied to the Indian subcontinent. The Centripetal Migration model, which assumes that migrations in quest of a better life unfolded in both centrifugal and centripetal directions with respect to technologically more advanced centres of civilisation, is opposed to the Farming Language Dispersal theory, which assumes that all linguistic dispersals were driven by agricultural centrifugal migration 1 . 1 This contribution in honour of Sergej Jevgen’evič Jakhontov is a reworked version of a piece which appeared in 2014 under the title ‘A prehistoric thoroughfare between