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Red cell antigen, serum protein and red cell enzyme groups were determined for a series of 1,821 individuals belonging to six language families in Western New Guinea. Three of the language families represent groupings of languages spoken by people in the swampy coastal plain of south central Western New Guinea, two belong to the Central Highlands and one to the Lake Plain area near the confluence of the Idenburg and Rouffaer Rivers. The distribution of genetic markers reveals similarities with other parts of New Guinea. The A2 allele is absent in the ABO system, the frequency of Ns in the MNS system is very high as is the R1 (CDe) allele in the Rh system. Hp1 frequencies are high, and the transferrin allele TfD1 is present as in other parts of New Guinea. In the red cell enzyme systems several alleles were detected which are characteristic of Papuan, and in some cases other Melanesian populations: these include MDH3, PGK4, PGK2, PGM92, PGM102, as well as some very restricted alleles such as Peptidase B6 and Pep B2. Three indices of genetic distance were computed. The most striking results are the genetic closeness of the Dani and Moni populations from the Central Highlands to the Asmat on the southern coastal plain, and the relative remoteness of the Awyu from the other south coastal populations. The results are discussed in terms of recent theories on the origin and dispersal of Papuan languages.

New Guinea is one of the most linguistically complex areas in the world with more than 740 Papuan and 250 Austronesian languages identified so far. Recent research into the relationships between these languages has enabled the construction of a schema for the migration of peoples into New Guinea and the consequent effects on the existing languages. The earliest peoples to enter New Guinea some 60,000 years ago, spoke Australoid languages and these are spoken still by Australian Aborigines. The first migration into New Guinea, of people speaking Papuan languages, may have started 15,000 years ago. This overlaid the Australoid languages and, in turn, was modified by the second Papuan language migration which began perhaps 10,000 years ago. A third and main Papuan language migration occurred between 5000 to 4000 years ago and again overlaid many of the the existing languages or resulted in movements of older languages to new areas. Contemporaneously with the third Papuan language migration, speakers of Austronesian languages were moving eastwards along the north coast of New Guinea and out into the Western Pacific. This was followed by a second migration of Austronesian speakers moving back westwards onto the north eastern areas of New Guinea about 4500 years ago.

(1988). Switch‐reference in Papuan languages: A syntactic or Extrasyntactic device? Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 75-117.

a recent article1 1 have shown or at least made probable that there is a distant genetic relationship between a group of Papuan (non-Austronesian) languages in the Vogelkop peninsula of Netherlands New Guinea and the equally non-Austronesian languages of North Halmahera in East Indonesia. This conclusion was arrived at largely with the help of Morris Swadesh's methods of testing and proving relationships used by him in Amerindian comparative linguistics. These methods are based on the probability calculus specially adapted for the purpose in a formula for calculating the chances of coincidence in a number of corresponding words of, preferably, consonant-vowel-consonant (C.V.C.) complexity in the languages to be compared, found in a test list of 97 non-cultural words.2 The Vogelkop languages compared in my paper just mentioned are Moi, Kalabra, Moraid, Madik, Karon and Ajamara. Not included were a number of other languages in that area, described in my : " Voorlopige Resultaten van een Ambtelijk Taalonderzoek in Nieuw-Guinea,"3 because they were too divergent and would only complicate the main purpose of the comparison. It is the object of the present paper to try and show with the help of Swadesh's test that these languages or at least most of them are, nevertheless, related to the others and thus constitute, together with these, a large group of Vogelkop languages related to North Halmaheran. The languages in question are those of Amberbaken, Mansibaber, Mantion, Ronda, Jahadian, Kampong Bara and Puragi. They are spoken to the east and south-east of the others and can be divided in a northern, and eastern and a southern group. The northern group is represented by Amberbaken alone, the eastern group consists of Mansibaber and Mantion, and the southern group includes the remaining four. The latter can be subdivided in two pairs : Konda/ Jahadian and Kp. Bara/ Puragi. As against these groups Moi, Kalabra, Moraid, Madik and Karon form a western group and Ajamaru alone a central, which has, however, special connections with the western group. Grammatically these languages are, with the exception of Mansibaber, practically as unknown as the western group. Mansibaber has a prefixal conjugation

1. Introduction (by Weissenborn, Jurgen) 2. Up/down, front/back, left/right. A contrastive study of Hausa and English (by Hill, Clifford) 3. Da and the system of spatial deixis in German (by Ehrich, Veronika) 4. Representations of local Ni-deixis in Swahili in Relation to Buhler's "Origo des Zeigfelds" (by Opalka, Hubertus) 5. Some systems of spatial deixis in Papuan Languages (by Heeschen, Volker) 6. Local Deixis in Tolai (by Mosel-Kreutzer, Ulrike) 7. The system of local deixis in Spanish (by Hottenroth, Priska-Monika) 8. On verb deixis in Hungarian (by Batori, Istvaan) 9. Demonstrative pronouns in Russian and Czech-deixis and anaphora (by Hauenschild, Christa) 10. Deixis and anaphora in German dialects: The semantics and pragmatics of two definite articles in dialectical varieties (by Hartmann, Dietrich) 11. Some remarks on Japanese deictics (by Coulmas, Florian) 12. Hopi Person deixis (by Malotki, Eckehart) 13. Zur historischen Entwicklung der Personendeixis im Chinesischen (by Pasierbsky, Fritz) 14. The deictic system of Diyari (by Austin, Peter) 15. Contributors 16. Index of Names 17. Index of Subjects

Archaeological excavations on the island of Badu have for the first time revealed evidence of people in Torres Strait before 2500 years BP. We interpret this evidence as representing three phases of island use and occupation. Phase 1 (8000-6000 years BP), when the high islands of Tortes Strait were part of terminal Greater Australia, saw permanent occupation of the region. During Phase 2 (6000-c.3500/3000 years BP), the Western Islands of Tones Strait were occasionally visited from Cape York. And in Phase 3 (c.3500/3000 years BP to present) the islands became occupied mainly by speakers of languages with strong Papuan and Austronesian elements from the north and northeast. We argue for Austronesian influences at the tip of Australia during the late Holocene. KEYWORDS: Torres Strait, Badu, island colonisation, Austronesian, New Guinea ********** Torres Strait, named after the Spanish navigator Luis Baez de Tortes who sailed through the Strait in 1606, is a 150-km-long chain of islands, coral reefs and cays located between the southern Papuan coastline and Cape York Peninsula, and occupies an intriguing position between two cultural realms: Aboriginal cultures of northern Australia and Melanesian cultures of New Guinea. Before global sea levels began to rise after the Last Glacial Maximum, a land bridge existed across the Strait (Harris 1977; Walker 1972). Reef coring in the region has demonstrated that as sea levels started to rise, Torres Strait began to take on its present form approximately 8000-7000 years BP (e.g. Barbara 1999; Woodroffe et al. 2000), although island formation is ongoing (Barham 2000). The geographic positioning of Torres Strait has generated considerable debate as to whether Torres Strait has acted as a bridge or barrier to cultural, genetic, linguistic and environmental forces between Australia and New Guinea (e.g. Walker 1972). Geographically, Tones Strait can be divided into four main island groupings: Western, Top Western, Central and Eastern. The geologic makeup of the islands reveals high acid volcanic and granitic rocks in the Western and Central Islands. The Top Western Islands--with the exception of Dauan--are flat and muddy, devoid of any rock. The Eastern Islands--Dauar, Waier, Mer, Erub and Ugar--are made of acid volcanic rocks. Linguistic divisions also exist across Torres Strait. The traditional Eastern language was, and in a few instances continues to be, Meriam Mir (a Papuan language), whereas elsewhere dialects of the traditional Western-Central Language (1) (an Australian language) were, and in many instances continue to be, spoken: Kala(w) Lagaw Ya (Western Islanders); Kalaw Kawaw Ya (Top Western Islanders); Kulkalgaw Ya (a.k.a. Dhadhalagaw Ya) (Central Islanders); and Kawalgaw Ya (a.k.a. Kowrareg) (South-West Islanders) (cf. Shnukal 1998; Shnukal & Mitchell 1998). The 1898 'Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits', under the leadership of Alfred Cort Haddon, placed Torres Strait on the world anthropological map (Herle & Rouse 1998). This was one of the most successful broad-scale ethnographic studies undertaken in the modern era. Haddon and his colleagues recorded many aspects of Torres Strait Islander culture, including oral traditions, religion, magic, kinship, music and art. These ethnographic details were published in six volumes between 1901 and 1935 and remain to this day the single most important ethnographic research undertaken in the region. Inter-regional interactions, including trade relations and kinship ties, have played important roles in Islander culture. Haddon (1904) noted three different types of trade occurring across Torres Strait: intra-insular trade, trade with New Guinea, and trade with Cape York. Alliances were also frequently established between neighbouring islands. Islander settlement focused on 'home' islands supplemented by seasonal visits to allied islands and smaller islands to exploit seasonal foods from surrounding seas, to perform secret ceremonies, to maintain and develop land and sea based territories, and to undertake trade. …

This paper describes the linguistic description of time, the accompanying gestural system, and the “mental time lines” found in the speakers of Yeli Dnye, an isolate language spoken offshore from Papua New Guinea. Like many indigenous languages, Yeli Dnye has no fixed anchoring of time and thus no calendrical time. Instead, time in Yeli Dnye linguistic description is primarily anchored to the time of speaking, with six diurnal tenses and special nominals for n days from coding time; this is supplemented with special constructions for overlapping events. Consequently there is relatively little cross-over or metaphor from space to time. The gesture system, on the other hand, uses pointing to sun position to indicate time of day and may make use of systematic time lines. Experimental evidence fails to show a single robust axis used for mapping time to space. This suggests that there may not be a strong, universal tendency for systematic space-time mappings.

0. INTRODUCTION. As Wurm (1982) has so appropriately observed, the field of Papuan linguistics has come a long way in a relatively short time. No longer is it accurate to characterize Papuan languages as merely an undifferentiated, or at least genetically unassociated, collection of non-Austronesian speech communities. What has made the difference in the degree of our growing certainty regarding linguistic affinities among Papuan subgroups has been the marked increase in patient language-by-language descriptive research and low-level historical reconstruction.

Pacific populations can be distinguished by cultural differences, and of these language is one of the most striking. We have made a detailed study of genetic differentiation of populations in New Guinea and nearby areas using serum protein and red cell enzyme markers and have carried out a partial correlation analysis of genetic, geographic and linguistic distances between populations. The results show that genetic distance is correlated with geographic distance when linguistic difference is controlled. The results do not support the view that 2 forms of the Austronesian languages are associated with genetic distinctions. Contrasts between Austronesian and Papuan languages, which are reflected in genetic differences, are associated possibly with the highland and lowland origins of these populations. Within this major ecological division, the effects of local ecological factors are also of importance.