Bear, Panda, and Sino-Tibetan Homeland
In a previous post, I have listed and discussed several etyma found across Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages that all pointed to a common natural environment that likely was the homeland of proto-ST. Among them, the animal bear (ursus) is of the utmost interesting story that further helps us pinpoint the homeland of ST to western Basuria and eastern Himalaya ranges.
The etymon for bear in proto ST is dɣwjəm. In Tibetan-Burmo, it evolved to be d-wam, and later d-wom due to a vowel shift. In Old Sinitic Chinese, the word root evolved to be gwjəm, with a g-d replacement of the consonant, which is common in Tibetan-Burmo languages like Kanauri. Zhang Shuheng’s 2019 article in Sino-Platonic Papers “Three Ancient Words for Bear” proposed that a d-wam — g-wom shift is possible due to the above patterns of evolution.
Cognates based on dɣwjəm are overwhelmingly common across ST languages, evident in basically every single ST language and this fact can be checked in STEDT database. On the ground, dɣwjəm most likely refers to Asian Black Bear (ursus tibetanus) and this species is the most widely distributed in East Asia. Therefore, the fact d-wam as an etymon for bear is seen in most ST languages reveals that the Asian Black Bear had a very wide scope of geographical distribution across East Asia, from Tibetan Plateau to Korea, but coastal East China has not seen fossils or existence of Asian Black Bear. Today, d-wam as Asian Black Bear in Continental East Asia is present in southern China, Yunnan, western Basuria/eastern Himalaya, Korea, and outer Manchuria. Since d-wam is a validly confirmed ST etymon, all of these above regions could have been a homeland for ST.
However, we cannot rule out other regions that historically had seen d-wam could have also been the ST homeland. The only problem is when did Asian Black Bear go extinct from where its fossils were uncovered. If it had gone extinct a long time (say, Pleistocene) before human settlement in East Asia in the Holocene, then those regions that only historically featured Asian Black Bear, e.g. middle Yellow River, cannot possibly be the homeland of ST because the first ST speakers could not have seen Asian Black Bear there. However, supporting literature documenting the fossils and their carbon-dated ages of Asian Black Bear found in China is extremely obscure and lacking. The historical limit of Asian Black Bear’s existence in China is largely based on literary tradition such as 山海经、尚书、楚辞, whose mythological depiction of animals was ambiguous at best. Thus, on the more conservative side and to be safer, we should restrict our identification of the ST homeland to where the fossils, not the story documentation, of Asian Black Bear are found and recorded, such as western Basuria, Shaanxi, and Yunnan. This region is where ST ancestors of different tribes all witnessed Asian Black Bear and called it d-wam.
Other than the Sinitic descendant of proto-ST d-wam that is gwjəm (熊), Old Chinese had another term for a different kind of bear and written as 羆. This character often appeared together with 熊 as 熊羆 in the Book of Odes. Zhang Shuheng (2019) had meticulously documented the historical mentioning and evolution of these two characters in Chinese literature. The consensus is that 羆 is a bear with stripes or spots, and most likely associated with Eurasian Brown Bear (ursus arctos arctos).
The Old Chinese sound for 羆 is pray, it is reconstructed to have the same root with pran “spots/stripes” (斑), and both can be traced back to proto-Tibetan-Burmo *pral. Since both black bear and brown bear in East Asia have a white ring/stripe on their chest (up until maturity for brown bear), it is likely Old Chinese use gwjam pray 熊羆 together to either 1) denote both species as a common class, or, as suggested by Zhang Shuheng, 2) to use pray as an adjective to denote stripe-shaped bear.
In fact, the proto-TB root for stripes has a deeper origin as p(w)ay ⪤ b(w)ay, which means “encircled, ringed, striped”. This etymon evolves to be pai in Mikhir to mean ring, pài in Jingpho to mean spotted, lo⁵⁵ pi³³ in Nuosu to mean ring the jewlry. In rGyalrong languages, pri or pre specifically means yellow (brown) bear, contrasting it with black bear (tawom) and carrying the same meaning as the Old Chinese pray. The rjɨj in Tangut is a close relative of the rGyalrongic pri.
Since several ST languages possess a common root for the meanings of stripe and brown bear, ancestors of the ST language probably lived close to the natural habitat of brown bear (ursus arctos). Whereas the Asian Black Bear has a widespread distribution in China, brown bear’s habitat is quite restricted to the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya ranges. This, for the second time, strongly suggest the homeland of ST is located in western Basuria/eastern Himalaya.
Now, Eurasian bears of both the black and brown kinds are relatively well studied by comparative linguists. There is little controversy regarding what Old Chinese word each species corresponds to and what proto-ST root can be reconstructed for each, as seen above. One bear species that surprisingly went unnoticed by comparative linguists is Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), whose habitat today is strictly western Basuria. Giant Panda may have had a larger habitat limit in the past, but when was it and where is their habitat limit during the Holocene only? Do ST ancestors have a common etymon for Giant Panda too?
Giant Panda is sporadically called 貔(pi) or 白豹(bai bao, lit. white leopard) in 尚书, but the depiction of 貔 is very ambiguous and figurative. However, from the previous section, we know that pway is the proto-ST root for spot/stripe. If 貔(pi) in ancient Chinese literature really signified Giant Panda, then it will match well with the intended meaning of “striped animal” embedded on the etymon pway. As supporting evidence, I found that ɣɔ⁴⁴ be³³ in Lisu is the name for Panda. ɣɔ is a common Loloish cognate for bear, deriving from ɣɔm, and be is an adjective cognate deriving from proto-Tibetan-Burmo p(w)ay ⪤ b(w)ay.
Where was Giant Panda possibly distributed then? Although dental fossils of Giant Panda are said to be found as far north as Zhoukoudian, new studies excluded this northmost site because the size of the dental fossil was too large to be from Giant Panda. Additionally, the Zhoukoudian fossil was dated the Pleistocene era, far too early for human interaction with the animal. With regard to the claimed Giant Panda teeth fossil found at Lingjing, Henan, the only source identifiable came from a few Chinese website without further citation of any original publication. The only academic paleoarchaeology study on this fossil record was a study by 李占扬 & 董为 (2007). This study explicitly stated that the fossil tooth belonged to unspecified ursidae bear, likely brown bear, but further class cannot be established. Similar with the Zhoukoudian fossil, Lingjing fossil was then probably taken by nationalist propaganda to exaggerate the historical limit of Giant Panda habitat. Correcting the exaggeration, the real distribution of all known fossils of Giant Panda is exclusively in southern China and Southeast Asia.
In this map, a few fossil sites are located in the traditional area of Yangshao culture, but the main cultural center of Yangshao (i.e. Shanxi, northern Shaanxi, Hebei) does not contain any site of panda fossils. Furthermore, the descendant of Yangshao — Majiayao culture, does not contain any such site either. If proto-ST ancestors originated from Yangshao culture, they would not have any knowledge of the Giant Panda, let alone naming it with a word related to the common ST etyma pway.
On top of the overall distribution of all known fossils, a study published in MDPI-Genes found that panda diversity was rapidly lost during the Holocene, as a part of the Holocene extinction. This means many of the mid-Pleistocene sites of panda habitat should have already disappeared by the time humans appeared in East Asia, leaving the panda-active areas during the Neolithic era to be closer to where they are mostly active today, which is western and northern Basuria.
Now we have established that Asian Black Bear, Eurasian Brown Bear, and Giant Panda, each has their own common word root in the proto-ST language and such word roots have been preserved in many modern ST languages. Thus, by the principle of comparative linguistics, the speakers of the proto-ST language, who first appeared in East Asia in 7000–8000 bp, should have been living in an environment where all three species were found. We have already seen in the maps above: the only overlapping area in which Eurasian Brown Bear and Asian Black Bear intersect is western Basuria/eastern Himalaya; Giant Panda’s active sphere since the Holocene is mostly restricted to Basuria and Shaanxi. Based on the evidence of fossil excavation, climate, and flora habitat, the safe bet for the location of such an environment can only be western Basuria/eastern Himalaya.
