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terminologies, collected by Lewis H. Morgan during his time among eastern North American Indians (paradigmatically, the Iroquois), and L. H. Morgan's perspective cast a spell on the way anthropologists have been thinking of kin classifications. Had western North American Indian kin terminologies been introduced into anthropology from the very start, the development of kinship studies very likely would have taken an altogether different route. For the Shoshone, I related their kinship structure to the annual cycles of dispersion and concentration (Dziebel, 1994, 2005b); for the world, I finally put together a set of poorly understood or “anomalous” terminological variants mostly recorded in the Americas, Asia, and Australia into an evolutionary sequence (Dziebel, 2001).
The following discussion is based on a database of some 2500 kinship vocabularies representing roughly 600 African languages, 140 Australian languages, 500 Austronesian languages, 200 Papuan languages, 350 languages of Eurasia (excluding Indo-Europeans), 440 North and Middle American Indian languages, and 200 South American languages. For many of them, several dialectal and temporal variants are available, which makes the actual number of kin terminologies in the sample even greater. Indo-European (IE) kin terminologies were not included in the count, since the richness of historical sources and the thoroughness of our knowledge of IE historical phonology places etymological minutae, rather than global comparison, into the focus of kin terminological research within this language family. Alternatively, the diversification of IE languages has little bearing on either the “out-of-Africa” model of human dispersals or the “peopling of the Americas.”
Nearly all possible sources were consulted, including many of the unpublished M.A. and Ph.D. theses, and a comprehensive bibliography of kinship terminological sources and kinship studies in anthropology and linguistics in English, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, and Lithuanian languages emerged as a by-product of the database composition. Russian sources were actively utilized for such areas as Europe, Siberia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and a