3 ms·

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/articl

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.

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.