[HN Gopher] First languages of North America traced back to two ...
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First languages of North America traced back to two groups from
Siberia
Author : bikenaga
Score : 82 points
Date : 2024-04-09 14:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| qsi wrote:
| 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
| vladgur wrote:
| 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
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| apparently some groups followed woolly mammoth herds (and
| eventually hunted them to extinction)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammoth_specimens
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| 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.
| aatharuv wrote:
| 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.
| lacrosse_tannin wrote:
| Maybe the language moved the other direction, North America ->
| Siberia
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| How did people end up in North America then?
| tshaddox wrote:
| The question would be how they ended up in Siberia. :)
| ImJamal wrote:
| Don't most of the people involved with research believe
| humans first evolved in Africa? If so, they presumably
| migrated north yo Siberia.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| People _did_ move back and forth across the bering strait
| well into historic times. It 's not what this article is
| about though, which tries to look at shared morphology across
| geographic partitions to tease out the likely origins and
| timings involved. In this case they (very tentatively)
| identified coastal and inland origins that match up with
| other numbers and _do not_ match up with beringian standstill
| hypotheses.
|
| It's also worth emphasizing that Indigenous nations (first
| nations not being a sufficiently general term) don't have
| consistent views on this matter and don't usually identify
| specific dates or timelines.
|
| You _can_ identify specific positions advocated by indigenous
| individuals. For example, there are indigenous people who
| argue indigenous heritage in the Americas predates
| anatomically modern humans leaving Africa. You can also find
| indigenous people who agree with academically-accepted ideas
| about ethnogenesis. You can even find people who agree with
| both of these ideas simultaneously, similar to how you can
| find Christians who agree with consensus theories on human
| evolution and also identify the garden of Eden in the middle
| east somewhere. Rather than speaking about "first nations"
| as some sort of homogeneous mass, it's better to identify
| specific positions and talk about those instead.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bonzini wrote:
| 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...
| for some more information.
| cjensen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-ancest... )
| yorwba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The Bering land bridge lasted for thousands of years, why
| wouldn't there have been multiple waves of migration?
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