[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 : 165 points
Date : 2024-04-09 14:20 UTC (3 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
| angiosperm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 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.
| whycome wrote:
| > The Intuit
|
| Living in the high arctic is quite taxing.
| 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We have evidence of people living in Northern Siberia
| 72degN over 30,000 years ago, well before the last glacial
| maximum.
|
| https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/02/new-
| evidence...
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| ogurechny wrote:
| 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 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.
| canjobear wrote:
| This is a live hypothesis for the Yeniseian languages, the
| Siberian languages that are most likely to be related to North
| American languages. The Yeniseian languages are very unlike
| other nearby languages. So it's possible they represent a back-
| migration from America into Siberia.
| 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.
| qwytw wrote:
| > 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 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.
| angiosperm wrote:
| 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.
| bpiche wrote:
| Am not a comparative linguist by trade but thought the Dene-
| Yenesian hypothesis was pretty well established at this point?
|
| Edit: wiki link
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_la...
|
| First link was proposed by Merrit Ruhlen in 98. People have
| opinions about him but he and his mentor Greenberg did very
| well received work on African comparative ling
| AprilArcus wrote:
| Unfortunately, Ruhlen, Greenberg, and Starostin's work relies
| on mass comparison and is neither rigorous nor noteworthy.
| Prefixing languages are rare and most have been suggested to
| be related to one another at some point on that basis alone,
| starting with Trombetti's unscientific speculation in the
| 1920s.
|
| Ed Vajda brought rigor to the hypothesis in series of
| publications which established Dene-Yenesian through the
| comparative method starting in 2008 and continuing to the
| present. Nichols briefly and favorably reviews this
| bibliography in her paper. As a senior researcher in the
| field, she was one of Vajda's original advocates when his
| proposal made its splashy debut.
| paganel wrote:
| Ignoring the 10k-20k years part, which I agree it's a little
| iffy, by definition the first languages of North America
| originated in Siberia and in the present Russian Far-East, for
| the simple reason that there's from where the first populations
| of North Americans came from (I think that the Trans-Pacific
| theory is not widely accepted).
|
| Unless those populations _only_ started using language once
| they had set foot in North America, which would be an even
| greater thing to push.
| 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?
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Note, this is disputed by some of the Dine:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpJd-V2n4U
| alsetmusic wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I recommend the Youtube channel RobWords for those kinds of
| explanations:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j07f-cKWRtk
| throwiforgtnlzy wrote:
| The 3-part documentary _Do You Speak American? (2005)_ is also
| interesting on the evolution of English (and non-English)
| accents.
| tgtaptarget wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I strongly recommend Dixon's The Rise and Fall of Languages
| (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 wrote:
| 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
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