Kinship structures create persistent channels for language transmission.

Languages are transmitted through channels created by kinship systems. Given sufficient time, these kinship channels can change the genetic and linguistic structure of populations. In traditional societies of eastern Indonesia, finely resolved cophylogenies of languages and genes reveal persistent movements between stable speech communities facilitated by kinship rules. When multiple languages are present in a region and postmarital residence rules encourage sustained directional movement between speech communities, then languages should be channeled along uniparental lines. We find strong evidence for this pattern in 982 individuals from 25 villages on two adjacent islands, where different kinship rules have been followed. Core groups of close relatives have stayed together for generations, while remaining in contact with, and marrying into, surrounding groups. Over time, these kinship systems shaped their gene and language phylogenies: Consistently following a postmarital residence rule turned social communities into speech communities.

Criticality of forcing directions on the fragmentation and resilience of grid networks.

A general framework for probing the dynamic evolution of spatial networks comprised of nodes applying force amongst each other is presented. Aside from the already reported magnitude of forces and elongation thresholds, we show that preservation of links in a network is also crucially dependent on how nodes are connected and how edges are directed. We demonstrate that the time it takes for the networks to reach its equilibrium network structure follows a robust power law relationship consistent with Basquin's law with an exponent that can be tuned by changing only the force directions. Further, we illustrate that networks with different connection structures, node positions and edge directions have different Basquin's exponent which can be used to distinguish spatial directed networks from each other. Using an extensive waiting time simulation that spans up to over 16 orders of magnitude, we establish that the presence of memory combined with the scale-free bursty dynamics of edge breaking at the micro level leads to the evident macroscopic power law distribution of network lifetime.