7 ms·

First languages of North America traced back to two groups from Siberia

169 points by bikenaga 3y ago

qsi 3y ago
The linked article is a bit sparse on detail but you can read the actual paper as well (not paywalled to my surprise): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24923 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24923
vladgur 3y ago
That makes sense, considering that "Amerindians" came from Asia via the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago[1]. 1.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874220 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874220
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Except the Inuit and similar peoples point and laugh at land bridges. You don't need a "land" bridge if you can live on the ice. Out there somewhere is probably a site showing that a wandering group of people paddled along the ice NA from Siberia long before anyone could walk the journey on dry land.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    apparently some groups followed woolly mammoth herds (and eventually hunted them to extinction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammoth_specimens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammoth_specimens
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      Mammoths and mastodons might be the only North American extinctions we can reliably blame on early Americans. The rest of the extinct macrofauna (30+ genera) fell to the end-Pleistocene comet strike and continent-spanning wildfires, or follow-on effects.
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        its just a very strange thought to me, that some early humans followed intelligent mammals like a pack of dogs, to feed on their meat. The mammoths were victims, to their complete demise. In another thread, post-civil war, US Calvary hunted all bison (a million animals? whole herds including calves?) to eliminate them and therefore cut the food supply of the native people; really brutal and ugly realities.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    The Intuit are a relatively recent group that's developed incredibly sophisticated technologies and cultural traditions that specifically enable(d) them to live on the ice and even then they're only dealing with our temperate Holocene climate. Ancient people wouldn't have had the benefits of that advanced technology and their environment was far harsher than today. The high arctic was one of the last places on earth inhabited by humans. We don't find evidence of humans (archaic or modern) before about 45ka. Even then, habitation seems to have been minuscule outside refuge microclimates for millennia. Beringia was probably the biggest and most important of the Arctic microclimates, likely comparable to modern Alaska in some areas.
    - whycome 3y ago
      > The Intuit Living in the high arctic is quite taxing.
  - throw_pm23 3y ago
    This argument goes both ways, so they could have wandered there long before or long after the land bridge existed. The linguistic link could be much stronger if there was direct connection a few thousand years ago.
  - jahewson 3y ago
    Unlikely as that would have been during the Ice Age and we have evidence of humans in Southern, but not Northern Siberia at that time.
    - Retric 3y ago
      We have evidence of people living in Northern Siberia 72°N over 30,000 years ago, well before the last glacial maximum. https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/02/new-evidence-early-human-activity-siberian-arctic https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/02/new-evidence...
- aatharuv 3y ago
  It makes sense but it's not trivial to discover, since languages separated by about 10,000 years have changed enough that it's almost impossible to find similarities. This paper talks about separations from 12-24 thousand years. Proto-Afro Asiatic (edit: ancestor of Coptic, Hebrew, Amhara, Arabic, Tigre, the Berber languages, Aramaic, Hausa (IIRC), and a number of less commonly spoken languages) likely dates back to more than 10K years ago, but we have the benefit of more than 5,000 years of writing in both Egyptian and the Akkadian. We don't have that benefit with any of the indigenous languages of Siberia or North America. Also, linguistic typology is not the best way to show relatedness, since languages change. For example, proto-Indo European had Nominative Accusative alignment, and was highly inflected, but modern English is almost completely uninflected, and Hindi has Ergative-Absolutive alignment for some tenses. I looked at the structural features they mentioned, and at least some of them are well known to change quite dramatically. (Some Indo European languages picked up a difference between exclusive and inclusive we, places of articulation change, languages develop and lose gendered nouns, others have lost some distinctions of number (dual has been lost in most IE languages). But I'm not a linguist, so any linguist can comment on whether these are fair criticisms. Also, as others mentioned Na-Dene (Navajo is the most spoken language in this group), is already believed to have a connection to the Ket language of Siberia.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > but modern English is almost completely uninflected That really depends what you're counting; if you ask which words in a sentence must be inflected, English still looks highly inflected. If you compare it to other inflected languages, the number of distinct forms for any given word is low, but this doesn't do much to help learners coming from languages that don't observe the same distinctions that require inflection in English. They don't do a lot better choosing between the fivish forms of an English verb than between the dozens of forms of a Latin verb. > dual has been lost in most IE languages This is a good tangential example; the dual persists, in reduced form, in modern English! We don't inflect verbs for it. But we do inflect determiners; we scrupulously distinguish both from all in a manner that most people in the world find confusing.
- dsndnas 3y ago
  [flagged]
- ogurechny 3y ago
  Does it “make sense” because it's in textbooks, or is it in textbooks because it “makes sense”? Time and again, “real scientists” act like teenage pop star fans when something is established as “making sense”. I'm not even talking about politically important issues or personal gains from being part of some “school”, just something that is “generally accepted”… until it is not. For example, mass extinction event after an asteroid impact is such an enormous media icon that a lot of scientists merely work on decorating it. From the very beginning, there was evidence that extinction was neither short nor had a single peak, but it was routinely dismissed as “local variations” or without any reason at all, simply because it made things more complex. Too many people solve the problem actually stated as “What if everything we believe is true, which models should we invent to support it?” It is important to think whether you are studying something, or just gathering the pieces in a pre-defined manner.
lacrosse_tannin 3y ago
Maybe the language moved the other direction, North America -> Siberia
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  How did people end up in North America then?
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    The question would be how they ended up in Siberia. :)
    - ImJamal 3y ago
      Don't most of the people involved with research believe humans first evolved in Africa? If so, they presumably migrated north yo Siberia.
    - goatlover 3y ago
      It's a lot easier for prehistoric humans to migrate from Africa up to Sibera, and then across to North America, rather than sailing across the Atlantic to the Americas, and then migrating to Siberia. Plus I'm guessing all the paleontological evidence supports older settlements in Sibera, as that would be consistent with older settlements in the rest of Eurasia from waves of migrations coming out of Africa.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  It's an interesting thought, but I think genetic analysis has shown that the populations at least moved west to east. Last time I read up on this, the TDLR was that genetic lineage + genetic diversity show a pretty clear "settlement of a few small groups of people" pattern. Now, I suppose you could imagine a scenario where populations moved back and forth and the languages went westwards again after the settlement of the Americas. Definitely the dates for settlement of this continent keep going further and further back than consensus admitted in the past. (Which is what First Nations have been telling us all along)
baltimore 3y ago
[flagged]
- kibwen 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - IncreasePosts 3y ago
    What's the purported logic for Alaska belonging to Russia? It was Russia's idea to sell Alaska in the first place, and was signed off by the emperor.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Not sure why you're downvoted for this, but it's exactly right. It's the same reason why liberals in the US remain flummoxed by Trump. You can't prove him wrong, he (and his supporters) doesn't care. It's about might-makes-right in all aspects. The quickly uttered phrase "alternative facts" is more cogent than critics will admit.
    - SamBam 3y ago
      The "historical borders" argument explicitly ignores anything that happened after the greatest extent of the borders. See also: Ukraine.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Putin routinely frames the decisions of his "weak" predecessors as unjust and in need of repair. Hence his justification of the invasion of Ukraine leans heavily on an ideological foundation that Lenin and Krushchev (and probably Gorbachev->Yeltsin) are to blame for its very existence. He ranted at length about Lenin in his speech on the eve of the invasion, and the talking point that "Crimea isn't Ukrainian it was a gift to them in the Kruschev era!" is all over the place, even by western sympathisers^Wuseful idiots. I imagine he could frame the Alaska scenario in a similar way, though I doubt he'd actually go that far. It's a "might makes right" philosophy. Those predecessors were "wrong" because they were weak, and a strong Russia is "right" or will make things "right" through its inherent superiority.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
I think the headline is a little bit too assertive for a paper that is very tentative, about a topic for which people should be very skeptical. Tracing languages features back 10,000-20,000+ years is a fairly iffy proposition. Proto Indo European is _only_ 5000ish years old in comparison.
- danans 3y ago
  > Proto Indo European is _only_ 5000ish years old in comparison. While I agree with that it's hard to make definitive statements about language relationships past 10K years, it's pretty well accepted that Proto Indo European existed around 7K years ago. By 5K years ago, it's primary subgroups, i.e Hellenic, Slavic, Germanic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian were already forming.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > By 5K years ago, it's primary subgroups, i.e Hellenic, Slavic, Germanic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian were already forming Didn't this process last a very long time though? IIRC the current consensus seems to be that Anatolian split off very early but Baltic/German/Slavic staid on the same branch until quite late (maybe even as late as 1000 BC) with other groups somewhere in between.
- bonzini 3y ago
  The article is very skimpy on the details, but it is worth mentioning that this is not the first time Siberian languages have been linked to indigenous North American languages. Na-Dene and Yeniseian languages are theorized to be part of a common family and the evidence is pretty good; they come respectively from America and Siberia. See https://www.science.org/content/article/land-bridge-connects-north-american-and-siberian-languages https://www.science.org/content/article/land-bridge-connects... for some more information.
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    It is interesting that this work places those languages entering only ~5kya, many millennia after the other language families were long established. Their success establishing residence particularly in the Pacific Northwest is remarkable. How they achieved it might never be known, but maybe some complex of technological innovations they brought enabled it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cjensen 3y ago
This seems like a rather extraordinary claim given that linguists have not even come to a consensus about American languages other than that there are dozens of language families. Seems odd to publish an extraordinary linguistic claim in the "Journal of Biological Anthropology." Is that a normal place for linguists to publish papers?
- kome 3y ago
  I mean native americans arrived from siberia... it's more a linguistic confirmation of a well know fact. why would it be extraordinary? (for example: https://www.science.org/content/article/closest-known-ancestor-today-s-native-americans-found-siberia https://www.science.org/content/article/closest-known-ancest... )
  - yorwba 3y ago
    The extraordinary part is not that they arrived from Siberia, but the claim that two distinct migration waves (well, really four, but the other two are accepted language families) can be distinguished in the linguistic data.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      The Bering land bridge lasted for thousands of years, why wouldn't there have been multiple waves of migration?
      - jcranmer 3y ago
        It's specifically the claim that we can say enough about linguistics to use it as evidence for multiple waves of migration. (We have evidence for multiple waves from other sources, chiefly haplogroups.)
  - nullstyle 3y ago
    Note, this is disputed by some of the Diné: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpJd-V2n4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpJd-V2n4U
backtoyoujim 3y ago
[flagged]
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]
alsetmusic 3y ago
Seems a good time to recommend a book that I found incredibly interesting: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395 Off the main topic, I know. But not enough opportunities arise where I can recommend this fantastic read. Turns out all the stupid aspects of English have very logical reasons for existing. It was mildly mind-blowing to have it all traced back so effectively. There was a great interview with the author on the 99% Invisible podcast, too.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  If you liked that, you should check out the History of English podcast. It is a great and long running podcast that looks at the history and other factors that gave us this language. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  I realize there are many, many factors that contribute to English spelling being so weird, but doesn't the Norman invasion account for the lion's share of them?
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    That would be strange, since the same phenomenon - linguistic drift away from ancient spellings - is observed in every language. The reason you see other languages as having spelling that is "less weird" than English is not that English is different from those other languages - it's that the spelling of those other languages is much more recent than the spelling of English is. The Norman contribution to the split between tough, through, and dough, for example, is zero.
  - Electricniko 3y ago
    I recommend the Youtube channel RobWords for those kinds of explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j07f-cKWRtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j07f-cKWRtk
- 3y ago
tgtaptarget 3y ago
Right away the author admits: "This paper proposes a model of settlement and expansion designed to integrate current linguistic analysis with other prehistoric research on the earliest episodes in the peopling of the Americas." Its easy to find evidence that supports the current assumptions.
angiosperm 3y ago
TIL about the Hartley Mammoth butchery site, 37kybp in New Mexico, via offhand mention in the paper. It will be hard for naysayers to discount it, given so many details seen almost exclusively in human contexts. Of course there would be no detectable linguistic remnants of these people after so long, so their place in the landscape of migrations may never be established.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dxjr6rvFXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dxjr6rvFXE The most interesting secondary information I got from this vid is that there are dozens of mammoth sites in North America that have not been excavated because they are considered too old to be potential human cultural sites, or because no interesting stone tools were found. The next was that the butchers of this mammoth lacked the sophisticated stone tool technology later migrations brought in. Thus, not finding stone tools does not disqualify a site as cultural. Apparently the stone tool technology was not known to the south Asian maritime population that first settled the Americas, but was brought in by the Siberian overland population.
throwaway743 3y ago
Interesting, especially seeing that there's a gene (or something. Was it halotype? idk) that originated in Siberia and was spread and shared shared among people in East Asia and the Americas. I know nothing about the field of genetics (if you couldn't tell), but saw a map of this recently
francisdavey 3y ago
I strongly recommend Dixon's The Rise and Fall of Languages (https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Dixon/dp/0521626544 https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Dixon/dp/0521626544) for a slightly contrary view. His experience with Australia suggests that languages can exist in equilibria for long periods of time with considerable borrowing of not only words but other language features so that after a long time you can't really usefully identify any evolutionary tree. What happens, he suggests, is occasionally you have significant events which cause one, or sometimes several closely located, languages to spread widely and then you can see a family tree over that period of time. For example: Indo-European. What you can't hope to do is to go back tens of thousands of years. Obviously he sees things through the filter of Australian linguistics, but he did some excellent fieldwork (which is also very interesting, though it may be out of print) and produced a wonderful monograph on Dyirbal (of "women, fire and dangerous things" fame).
- Projectiboga 3y ago
  Wow, that guy is quite the published expert. I looked him up, that possibly out of print one is available. https://annas-archive.org/search?q=R.%20M.%20W.%20Dixon https://annas-archive.org/search?q=R.%20M.%20W.%20Dixon

169 points by bikenaga 3y ago

qsi 3y ago

The linked article is a bit sparse on detail but you can read the actual paper as well (not paywalled to my surprise): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24923 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24923

vladgur 3y ago

That makes sense, considering that "Amerindians" came from Asia via the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago[1]. 1.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874220 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874220

sandworm101 3y ago
Except the Inuit and similar peoples point and laugh at land bridges. You don't need a "land" bridge if you can live on the ice. Out there somewhere is probably a site showing that a wandering group of people paddled along the ice NA from Siberia long before anyone could walk the journey on dry land.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  apparently some groups followed woolly mammoth herds (and eventually hunted them to extinction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammoth_specimens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammoth_specimens
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    Mammoths and mastodons might be the only North American extinctions we can reliably blame on early Americans. The rest of the extinct macrofauna (30+ genera) fell to the end-Pleistocene comet strike and continent-spanning wildfires, or follow-on effects.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      its just a very strange thought to me, that some early humans followed intelligent mammals like a pack of dogs, to feed on their meat. The mammoths were victims, to their complete demise. In another thread, post-civil war, US Calvary hunted all bison (a million animals? whole herds including calves?) to eliminate them and therefore cut the food supply of the native people; really brutal and ugly realities.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  The Intuit are a relatively recent group that's developed incredibly sophisticated technologies and cultural traditions that specifically enable(d) them to live on the ice and even then they're only dealing with our temperate Holocene climate. Ancient people wouldn't have had the benefits of that advanced technology and their environment was far harsher than today. The high arctic was one of the last places on earth inhabited by humans. We don't find evidence of humans (archaic or modern) before about 45ka. Even then, habitation seems to have been minuscule outside refuge microclimates for millennia. Beringia was probably the biggest and most important of the Arctic microclimates, likely comparable to modern Alaska in some areas.
  - whycome 3y ago
    > The Intuit Living in the high arctic is quite taxing.
- throw_pm23 3y ago
  This argument goes both ways, so they could have wandered there long before or long after the land bridge existed. The linguistic link could be much stronger if there was direct connection a few thousand years ago.
- jahewson 3y ago
  Unlikely as that would have been during the Ice Age and we have evidence of humans in Southern, but not Northern Siberia at that time.
  - Retric 3y ago
    We have evidence of people living in Northern Siberia 72°N over 30,000 years ago, well before the last glacial maximum. https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/02/new-evidence-early-human-activity-siberian-arctic https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/02/new-evidence...
aatharuv 3y ago
It makes sense but it's not trivial to discover, since languages separated by about 10,000 years have changed enough that it's almost impossible to find similarities. This paper talks about separations from 12-24 thousand years. Proto-Afro Asiatic (edit: ancestor of Coptic, Hebrew, Amhara, Arabic, Tigre, the Berber languages, Aramaic, Hausa (IIRC), and a number of less commonly spoken languages) likely dates back to more than 10K years ago, but we have the benefit of more than 5,000 years of writing in both Egyptian and the Akkadian. We don't have that benefit with any of the indigenous languages of Siberia or North America. Also, linguistic typology is not the best way to show relatedness, since languages change. For example, proto-Indo European had Nominative Accusative alignment, and was highly inflected, but modern English is almost completely uninflected, and Hindi has Ergative-Absolutive alignment for some tenses. I looked at the structural features they mentioned, and at least some of them are well known to change quite dramatically. (Some Indo European languages picked up a difference between exclusive and inclusive we, places of articulation change, languages develop and lose gendered nouns, others have lost some distinctions of number (dual has been lost in most IE languages). But I'm not a linguist, so any linguist can comment on whether these are fair criticisms. Also, as others mentioned Na-Dene (Navajo is the most spoken language in this group), is already believed to have a connection to the Ket language of Siberia.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > but modern English is almost completely uninflected That really depends what you're counting; if you ask which words in a sentence must be inflected, English still looks highly inflected. If you compare it to other inflected languages, the number of distinct forms for any given word is low, but this doesn't do much to help learners coming from languages that don't observe the same distinctions that require inflection in English. They don't do a lot better choosing between the fivish forms of an English verb than between the dozens of forms of a Latin verb. > dual has been lost in most IE languages This is a good tangential example; the dual persists, in reduced form, in modern English! We don't inflect verbs for it. But we do inflect determiners; we scrupulously distinguish both from all in a manner that most people in the world find confusing.
dsndnas 3y ago
[flagged]
ogurechny 3y ago
Does it “make sense” because it's in textbooks, or is it in textbooks because it “makes sense”? Time and again, “real scientists” act like teenage pop star fans when something is established as “making sense”. I'm not even talking about politically important issues or personal gains from being part of some “school”, just something that is “generally accepted”… until it is not. For example, mass extinction event after an asteroid impact is such an enormous media icon that a lot of scientists merely work on decorating it. From the very beginning, there was evidence that extinction was neither short nor had a single peak, but it was routinely dismissed as “local variations” or without any reason at all, simply because it made things more complex. Too many people solve the problem actually stated as “What if everything we believe is true, which models should we invent to support it?” It is important to think whether you are studying something, or just gathering the pieces in a pre-defined manner.

lacrosse_tannin 3y ago

Maybe the language moved the other direction, North America -> Siberia

IncreasePosts 3y ago
How did people end up in North America then?
- tshaddox 3y ago
  The question would be how they ended up in Siberia. :)
  - ImJamal 3y ago
    Don't most of the people involved with research believe humans first evolved in Africa? If so, they presumably migrated north yo Siberia.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    It's a lot easier for prehistoric humans to migrate from Africa up to Sibera, and then across to North America, rather than sailing across the Atlantic to the Americas, and then migrating to Siberia. Plus I'm guessing all the paleontological evidence supports older settlements in Sibera, as that would be consistent with older settlements in the rest of Eurasia from waves of migrations coming out of Africa.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It's an interesting thought, but I think genetic analysis has shown that the populations at least moved west to east. Last time I read up on this, the TDLR was that genetic lineage + genetic diversity show a pretty clear "settlement of a few small groups of people" pattern. Now, I suppose you could imagine a scenario where populations moved back and forth and the languages went westwards again after the settlement of the Americas. Definitely the dates for settlement of this continent keep going further and further back than consensus admitted in the past. (Which is what First Nations have been telling us all along)

baltimore 3y ago

[flagged]

kibwen 3y ago
[flagged]
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  What's the purported logic for Alaska belonging to Russia? It was Russia's idea to sell Alaska in the first place, and was signed off by the emperor.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Not sure why you're downvoted for this, but it's exactly right. It's the same reason why liberals in the US remain flummoxed by Trump. You can't prove him wrong, he (and his supporters) doesn't care. It's about might-makes-right in all aspects. The quickly uttered phrase "alternative facts" is more cogent than critics will admit.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    The "historical borders" argument explicitly ignores anything that happened after the greatest extent of the borders. See also: Ukraine.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Putin routinely frames the decisions of his "weak" predecessors as unjust and in need of repair. Hence his justification of the invasion of Ukraine leans heavily on an ideological foundation that Lenin and Krushchev (and probably Gorbachev->Yeltsin) are to blame for its very existence. He ranted at length about Lenin in his speech on the eve of the invasion, and the talking point that "Crimea isn't Ukrainian it was a gift to them in the Kruschev era!" is all over the place, even by western sympathisers^Wuseful idiots. I imagine he could frame the Alaska scenario in a similar way, though I doubt he'd actually go that far. It's a "might makes right" philosophy. Those predecessors were "wrong" because they were weak, and a strong Russia is "right" or will make things "right" through its inherent superiority.

empath-nirvana 3y ago

I think the headline is a little bit too assertive for a paper that is very tentative, about a topic for which people should be very skeptical. Tracing languages features back 10,000-20,000+ years is a fairly iffy proposition. Proto Indo European is _only_ 5000ish years old in comparison.

danans 3y ago
> Proto Indo European is _only_ 5000ish years old in comparison. While I agree with that it's hard to make definitive statements about language relationships past 10K years, it's pretty well accepted that Proto Indo European existed around 7K years ago. By 5K years ago, it's primary subgroups, i.e Hellenic, Slavic, Germanic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian were already forming.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > By 5K years ago, it's primary subgroups, i.e Hellenic, Slavic, Germanic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian were already forming Didn't this process last a very long time though? IIRC the current consensus seems to be that Anatolian split off very early but Baltic/German/Slavic staid on the same branch until quite late (maybe even as late as 1000 BC) with other groups somewhere in between.
bonzini 3y ago
The article is very skimpy on the details, but it is worth mentioning that this is not the first time Siberian languages have been linked to indigenous North American languages. Na-Dene and Yeniseian languages are theorized to be part of a common family and the evidence is pretty good; they come respectively from America and Siberia. See https://www.science.org/content/article/land-bridge-connects-north-american-and-siberian-languages https://www.science.org/content/article/land-bridge-connects... for some more information.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  It is interesting that this work places those languages entering only ~5kya, many millennia after the other language families were long established. Their success establishing residence particularly in the Pacific Northwest is remarkable. How they achieved it might never be known, but maybe some complex of technological innovations they brought enabled it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cjensen 3y ago

This seems like a rather extraordinary claim given that linguists have not even come to a consensus about American languages other than that there are dozens of language families. Seems odd to publish an extraordinary linguistic claim in the "Journal of Biological Anthropology." Is that a normal place for linguists to publish papers?

kome 3y ago
I mean native americans arrived from siberia... it's more a linguistic confirmation of a well know fact. why would it be extraordinary? (for example: https://www.science.org/content/article/closest-known-ancestor-today-s-native-americans-found-siberia https://www.science.org/content/article/closest-known-ancest... )
- yorwba 3y ago
  The extraordinary part is not that they arrived from Siberia, but the claim that two distinct migration waves (well, really four, but the other two are accepted language families) can be distinguished in the linguistic data.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    The Bering land bridge lasted for thousands of years, why wouldn't there have been multiple waves of migration?
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      It's specifically the claim that we can say enough about linguistics to use it as evidence for multiple waves of migration. (We have evidence for multiple waves from other sources, chiefly haplogroups.)
- nullstyle 3y ago
  Note, this is disputed by some of the Diné: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpJd-V2n4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpJd-V2n4U

backtoyoujim 3y ago

[flagged]

decremental 3y ago
[dead]

alsetmusic 3y ago

Seems a good time to recommend a book that I found incredibly interesting: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395 Off the main topic, I know. But not enough opportunities arise where I can recommend this fantastic read. Turns out all the stupid aspects of English have very logical reasons for existing. It was mildly mind-blowing to have it all traced back so effectively. There was a great interview with the author on the 99% Invisible podcast, too.

Tagbert 3y ago
If you liked that, you should check out the History of English podcast. It is a great and long running podcast that looks at the history and other factors that gave us this language. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
HideousKojima 3y ago
I realize there are many, many factors that contribute to English spelling being so weird, but doesn't the Norman invasion account for the lion's share of them?
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  That would be strange, since the same phenomenon - linguistic drift away from ancient spellings - is observed in every language. The reason you see other languages as having spelling that is "less weird" than English is not that English is different from those other languages - it's that the spelling of those other languages is much more recent than the spelling of English is. The Norman contribution to the split between tough, through, and dough, for example, is zero.
- Electricniko 3y ago
  I recommend the Youtube channel RobWords for those kinds of explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j07f-cKWRtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j07f-cKWRtk
3y ago

tgtaptarget 3y ago

Right away the author admits: "This paper proposes a model of settlement and expansion designed to integrate current linguistic analysis with other prehistoric research on the earliest episodes in the peopling of the Americas." Its easy to find evidence that supports the current assumptions.

angiosperm 3y ago

TIL about the Hartley Mammoth butchery site, 37kybp in New Mexico, via offhand mention in the paper. It will be hard for naysayers to discount it, given so many details seen almost exclusively in human contexts. Of course there would be no detectable linguistic remnants of these people after so long, so their place in the landscape of migrations may never be established.

angiosperm 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dxjr6rvFXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dxjr6rvFXE The most interesting secondary information I got from this vid is that there are dozens of mammoth sites in North America that have not been excavated because they are considered too old to be potential human cultural sites, or because no interesting stone tools were found. The next was that the butchers of this mammoth lacked the sophisticated stone tool technology later migrations brought in. Thus, not finding stone tools does not disqualify a site as cultural. Apparently the stone tool technology was not known to the south Asian maritime population that first settled the Americas, but was brought in by the Siberian overland population.

throwaway743 3y ago

Interesting, especially seeing that there's a gene (or something. Was it halotype? idk) that originated in Siberia and was spread and shared shared among people in East Asia and the Americas. I know nothing about the field of genetics (if you couldn't tell), but saw a map of this recently

francisdavey 3y ago

I strongly recommend Dixon's The Rise and Fall of Languages (https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Dixon/dp/0521626544 https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Dixon/dp/0521626544) for a slightly contrary view. His experience with Australia suggests that languages can exist in equilibria for long periods of time with considerable borrowing of not only words but other language features so that after a long time you can't really usefully identify any evolutionary tree. What happens, he suggests, is occasionally you have significant events which cause one, or sometimes several closely located, languages to spread widely and then you can see a family tree over that period of time. For example: Indo-European. What you can't hope to do is to go back tens of thousands of years. Obviously he sees things through the filter of Australian linguistics, but he did some excellent fieldwork (which is also very interesting, though it may be out of print) and produced a wonderful monograph on Dyirbal (of "women, fire and dangerous things" fame).

Projectiboga 3y ago
Wow, that guy is quite the published expert. I looked him up, that possibly out of print one is available. https://annas-archive.org/search?q=R.%20M.%20W.%20Dixon https://annas-archive.org/search?q=R.%20M.%20W.%20Dixon