Fwd: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor

[Robert Brightman]

thanks Dick!  impressively topical
On 8/18/14 12:22 PM, Richard Preston wrote:
> cheers
> Dick
>
> http://www.richardpreston.ca/
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> *From: *Jennifer Preston <jennifer at quakerservice.ca 
>> <mailto:jennifer at quakerservice.ca>>
>> *Subject: **Fwd: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor*
>> *Date: *August 18, 2014 at 3:17:22 PM EDT
>> *To: *Dick Preston <prestonr at mcmaster.ca <mailto:prestonr at mcmaster.ca>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>>> *From: *Daniel Smoke <dsmoke at uwo.ca <mailto:dsmoke at uwo.ca>>
>>> *Subject: **Fwd: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait 
>>> Theor*
>>> *Date: *8 August, 2014 6:42:31 AM EDT
>>> *To: *Jean Koning <jean.koning at live.ca <mailto:jean.koning at live.ca>>
>>> *Cc: *Al Day <aday at namerind.on.ca <mailto:aday at namerind.on.ca>>, Pam 
>>> Palmater <ppalmater at politics.ryerson.ca 
>>> <mailto:ppalmater at politics.ryerson.ca>>, Gary Farmer 
>>> <garytroublemaker at gmail.com <mailto:garytroublemaker at gmail.com>>, 
>>> Cyndy Baskin <cbaskin at ryerson.ca <mailto:cbaskin at ryerson.ca>>, Raven 
>>> Redbird <sfive at rogers.com <mailto:sfive at rogers.com>>, Carrie Lester 
>>> <lester.carrie at rogers.com <mailto:lester.carrie at rogers.com>>, 
>>> Jennifer Preston-Howe <jennifer at quakerservice.ca 
>>> <mailto:jennifer at quakerservice.ca>>, Ken Deer 
>>> <kennethdeer104 at hotmail.com <mailto:kennethdeer104 at hotmail.com>>, 
>>> Deb Aaaron <debaaron at newcreditfirstnation.com 
>>> <mailto:debaaron at newcreditfirstnation.com>>, Peter Cole 
>>> <coyoteandraven at mac.com <mailto:coyoteandraven at mac.com>>, Anita 
>>> Rooke <arooke at gcna.com <mailto:arooke at gcna.com>>, Ward Churchill 
>>> <wardchurchill at yahoo.com <mailto:wardchurchill at yahoo.com>>, Blanche 
>>> Meawassige <meawassige at gmail.com <mailto:meawassige at gmail.com>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Mary Lou and Dan Smoke
>>> Adjunct Professors
>>> Smoke Signals, #3255 SSC
>>> http://london.ctvnews.ca/more/smoke-signals
>>> https://www.facebook.com/#1/ctvsmokesignals
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>>> dsmoke at uwo.ca <mailto:dsmoke at uwo.ca>
>>>
>>> *From: *Daniel Smoke <dsmoke at uwo.ca <mailto:dsmoke at uwo.ca>>
>>> *Subject: **How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor*
>>> *Date: *8 August, 2014 6:33:19 AM EDT
>>> *To: *Donald Smoke <donaldosmoke at gmail.com 
>>> <mailto:donaldosmoke at gmail.com>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Close
>>>
>>> Read more at 
>>> http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/19/how-linguists-are-pulling-apart-bering-strait-theory-154063?page=0%2C0
>>>
>>> How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait TheoryAlex Ewen 
>>> <http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/advanced/search?fq[0]=ts_field_full_name%3AAlex%20Ewen>
>>> 3/19/14
>>>
>>> Over the past few weeks, new scientific discoveries have rekindled 
>>> the debate over the Bering Strait Theory. Two of the discoveries 
>>> were covered recently in /Indian Country Today/. The first “More 
>>> Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory,” dealt with the 
>>> growing problem of “science by press release,” as scientific studies 
>>> hype their conclusions to the point that they are misleading; and 
>>> the second, “DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait 
>>> Theory,” discussed how politics can influence science, and the 
>>> negative effects these politically-based scientific results can have 
>>> on Native peoples.
>>>
>>> RELATED: More Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory 
>>> <http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/08/more-reasons-doubt-bering-strait-migration-theory>
>>>
>>> RELATED: DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait 
>>> Theory 
>>> <https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/11/dna-politics-anzick-child-casts-doubt-bering-strait-theory-153947>
>>>
>>> It is generally assumed that the Bering Strait Theory has almost 
>>> universal acceptance from scientists. So, for example, the /New York 
>>> Times/, in an article on March 12, “Pause Is Seen in a Continent’s 
>>> Peopling 
>>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/science/linguistic-study-sheds-new-light-on-peopling-of-north-america.html?_r=0>” 
>>> stated unequivocally that “The first migrations to North America 
>>> occurred between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago,” with the new wrinkle 
>>> that maybe on their way from Asia Indian ancestors laid over in the 
>>> Bering Strait region (Beringia) for thousands of years before 
>>> traveling on to the Americas.
>>>
>>> Therefore it is usually presumed that the primary critics of the 
>>> theory must be anti-science, like the “creationists” who argue 
>>> against evolution, or New Age pseudo-scientific conspiracy 
>>> theorists. Thus in 1995, when the late Sioux philosopher Vine 
>>> Deloria Jr. published /Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and 
>>> the Myth of Scientific Fact/ and challenged the Bering Strait 
>>> Theory, he was savagely attacked by many scientists who lumped him 
>>> in with those fringe groups.
>>>
>>> The vitriol that poured from some of the harshest critics, such as 
>>> John Whittaker, a professor of anthropology at Grinnell College 
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinnell_College>, who referred to 
>>> Deloria's book as "a wretched piece of Native American creationist 
>>> claptrap,” seemed excessive. The critics also demonstrated that they 
>>> clearly did not comprehend Deloria’s argument. /Red Earth, White 
>>> Lies, /embroidered by Deloria’s wry sense of humor and rambling 
>>> musings, shows he was not anti-science, but rather /anti-scientist/. 
>>> In particular, he was against those scientists who held narrow views 
>>> of the world, who had no respect for other people’s traditions, who 
>>> fostered a cult of superiority either for themselves or for their 
>>> society, and who were afraid to search for the truth unless it 
>>> already conformed with established opinion.
>>>
>>> Deloria also argued that science, when studying people, was not 
>>> neutral. In his view, some scientific theories harbored social and 
>>> political agendas that were used to deprive Indians and other 
>>> minorities of their rights. Many of the assumptions that underlay 
>>> certain scientific principles were based on obsolete religious or 
>>> social views, and he urged science to shed these dubious relics. The 
>>> issue for Deloria was not science vs. religion (or tradition), it 
>>> was good science vs. bad science, and in his view, the Bering Strait 
>>> Theory was bad science.
>>>
>>> Nor was Deloria alone in this opinion. Since it was first proposed 
>>> in the late 16th century, and especially in its most recent 
>>> incarnations in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, the most 
>>> vociferous critics of the Bering Strait Theory have been scientists. 
>>> Even among archaeologists and physical anthropologists, generally 
>>> the most dogmatic proponents of this theory, it has always been 
>>> extremely factious. And the abuse they would heap upon each other 
>>> was no less acidic than that they spewed on outsiders.
>>>
>>> In 1892, when the geologist George Frederick Wright published his 
>>> massive study, /Man and the Glacial Period/, which challenged some 
>>> of the tenets of the Bering Strait Theory as it was then formulated, 
>>> he was attacked, as David J. Meltzer pointed out in /First Peoples 
>>> in a New World/, “with a barrage of vicious reviews which were 
>>> unprecedented in number and savagery.” One critic of the book, 
>>> William John McGee, the head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 
>>> “was especially bloodthirsty, labeling Wright’s work absurdly 
>>> fallacious, unscientific, and an ‘offense to the nostrils,’ then 
>>> dismissing him as ‘a betinseled charlatan whose potions are poison. 
>>> Would that science might be well rid of such harpies.’”
>>>
>>> To understand just one of the many scientific criticisms of the 
>>> Bering Strait Theory, we go halfway around the world to the 
>>> continental mass known as the Sahul, which includes Australia, New 
>>> Guinea and surrounding islands. Like the Americas, it had long been 
>>> assumed by archaeologists that the Indigenous Peoples who lived in 
>>> that region had migrated there from Asia just a few thousand years 
>>> ago. It then came as a massive shock to those same archaeologists 
>>> when in 1968, near Lake Mungo in Southeastern Australia, the 
>>> geologist Jim Bowler discovered the remains of a cremated woman who 
>>> was subsequently radiocarbon-dated to be between 25,000 and 32,000 
>>> years old. Lake Mungo Woman, as she came to be known, was 
>>> repatriated to the Aboriginal community in 1992.
>>>
>>> Yet this discovery had already been anticipated by other scientists, 
>>> for example, the linguists. The Sahul is one of the most 
>>> linguistically diverse areas in the world, home to more than 1,000 
>>> languages, about one-fifth of the world’s total. The linguists had 
>>> already predicted that the “time depth” required to achieve this 
>>> type of linguistic diversity was clearly not in the thousands of 
>>> years, but in the tens of thousands of years. Subsequent 
>>> archaeological finds have now pushed back the date of human 
>>> occupation of Australia to a minimum of 45,000 years ago and 
>>> possibly 60,000 years ago.
>>>
>>> The only area in the world that has a comparable level of linguistic 
>>> diversity as the Sahul is the Americas, and in certain very 
>>> important respects, the Americas were even more diverse. Since the 
>>> very first period of contact between Europeans and Indians, 
>>> observers had marveled at how many different languages and cultures 
>>> were to be found. Thomas Jefferson, among the leading scientists of 
>>> his day, wrote in 1785 in his /Notes on the State of Virginia/.
>>>
>>> /Imperfect as is our knowledge of the tongues spoken in America, it 
>>> suffices to discover the following remarkable fact. Arranging them 
>>> under the radical ones to which they may be palpably traced, and 
>>> doing the same by those of the red men of Asia, there will be found 
>>> probably twenty in America, for one in Asia, of those radical 
>>> languages, so called because, if they were ever the same, they have 
>>> lost all resemblance to one another. /
>>>
>>> Today, linguists call Jefferson’s “radical languages,” language 
>>> families or stocks, each made up of numerous languages and dialects. 
>>> As Jefferson saw it, this diversity clearly pointed to the great age 
>>> of American Indians; “A separation into dialects may be the work of 
>>> a few ages only, but for two dialects to recede from one another 
>>> till they have lost all vestiges of their common origin, must 
>>> require an immense course of time; perhaps not less than many people 
>>> give to the age of the earth.”
>>>
>>> Based upon the linguistic evidence, Jefferson believed that “a 
>>> greater number of those radical changes of language having taken 
>>> place among the red men of America, proves them of greater antiquity 
>>> than those of Asia,” and led him to speculate that Asians may have 
>>> been the descendants of early American Indian migrations from the 
>>> Americas to Asia.
>>>
>>> Exactly how diverse the American languages were became clearer in 
>>> 1891, when the famed explorer and director of the Bureau of 
>>> Ethnology, John Wesley Powell, released the monumental work, /Indian 
>>> Linguistic Families North of Mexico./ In his introduction, Powell 
>>> explained that, “The North American Indian tribes, instead of 
>>> speaking related dialects, originating in a single parent language, 
>>> in reality speak many languages belonging to distinct families, 
>>> which have no apparent unity of origin.” Powell grouped the American 
>>> Indian languages in the U.S. and Canada into 58 language families 
>>> (or stocks) that could not be shown to be related to one another.
>>>
>>> Since Powell’s day his classification has been modified somewhat and 
>>> attempts to link many of these language stocks together to create 
>>> “super stocks” have met with mixed success. Although what 
>>> constitutes a family, stock or super stock is a matter of continuing 
>>> debate among linguists, today it is generally accepted that there 
>>> are 150 different language stocks in the Americas. To give some 
>>> perspective to this diversity, there are more language stocks in the 
>>> Americas/than in the rest of the world combined/.
>>>
>>> One of the 150 New World language stocks, Eskimo-Aleut, also spans 
>>> the Arctic and so has Asian and European relatives. Another language 
>>> super stock, Na-Dené, composed of the language stocks Athabaskan, 
>>> Tlingit and Eyak, and located in Alaska and the northwest coast (but 
>>> also in the southwestern U.S.), is also believed to have relatives 
>>> in Asia, possibly the Yeneisian languages of central Siberia.
>>>
>>> It has long been suggested, and the issue is not particularly 
>>> controversial, that peoples speaking Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené moved 
>>> back and forth between Asia and the Americas. A new study published 
>>> on March 12 in the journal PLoS, “Linguistic Phylogenies Support 
>>> Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia,” found that Na-Dené is not 
>>> descended from Yeneisian (as the Bering Strait Theory would infer) 
>>> but the other way around, that there was a “back-migration into 
>>> central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North 
>>> America.” (As an aside, the study, true to “science by press 
>>> release” fashion, argues that this supports the “Beringian 
>>> Standstill” hypothesis–that Indians paused in Beringia for thousands 
>>> of years before colonizing the New World–but the study only examined 
>>> the Na-Dené language stock, whose speakers still live in the Alaskan 
>>> part of Beringia to this very day, and so it would seem the study 
>>> would just as easily support the Na-Dené view that they have been 
>>> there since time immemorial.)
>>>
>>> Other than Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené, linguists have yet to find any 
>>> connection with any language stocks of the Americas and those of 
>>> Asia. Along with the tremendous hemispheric diversity, this created 
>>> serious doubts about the dates proposed by archaeologists and 
>>> physical anthropologists for Indian origins. At the beginning of the 
>>> 20th century it was held to be at most 10,000 years and generally 
>>> only 5,000 years. In 1916, Edward Sapir, among the most important 
>>> and influential linguists in history, countered the prevailing 
>>> archaeological view; “ten thousand years, however, seems a 
>>> hopelessly inadequate span of time for the development from a 
>>> homogeneous origin of such linguistic differentiation as is actually 
>>> found in America.” Instead he argued that, “the best piece of 
>>> evidence of great antiquity of man in America is linguistic 
>>> diversification rather than archaeological.”
>>>
>>> One of America’s greatest scientists, Franz Boas, generally 
>>> considered to be the father of modern anthropology and an important 
>>> linguist in his own right, in his classic study, /Race, Language, 
>>> and Culture,/ published in 1940, wrote that not only were American 
>>> Indian languages “so different among themselves that it seems 
>>> doubtful whether the period of 10,000 years is sufficient for their 
>>> differentiation,” but that the evidence of extremely ancient Indians 
>>> would some day be found, and that, “all we can say, therefore, is 
>>> that the search for early remains must continue.” Indeed, Boas was 
>>> among the first to propose, based on the evidence from an expedition 
>>> that he led to the Bering Strait region in 1897, the “back 
>>> migration” from the Americas to Asia
>>>
>>> Linguists were not the only ones who recognized the importance of 
>>> the linguistic evidence. The great British paleo-anthropologist 
>>> Louis Leakey firmly believed that the linguistic evidence showed 
>>> that Indians were likely to be many tens of thousands of years old 
>>> and possibly much older, and shortly before his death in 1972 he 
>>> began to sponsor fieldwork in the Americas in the hopes of proving 
>>> this. But most American archaeologists and physical anthropologists, 
>>> where the dogmatism of the Bering Strait Theory is most pronounced, 
>>> dismissed or ignored the linguistic evidence, leading people and the 
>>> mainstream press to assume that linguists were silent on this 
>>> subject, even though the reverse was true.
>>>
>>> Starting in 1987, the tensions between the proponents of the Bering 
>>> Strait Theory and linguists turned into open warfare as 
>>> archaeologists and geneticists used a highly disputed (and now 
>>> completely discredited) theory by the linguist Joseph Greenberg to 
>>> claim that the linguistic evidence now (after hundreds of years of 
>>> refuting it) showed that Indians migrated from Asia to the New World 
>>> around 15,000 years ago. The dispute led to a torrent of scientific 
>>> papers by the world’s most prominent linguists denouncing the use of 
>>> “non-science” and faulty data to back the Bering Strait Theory. The 
>>> archaeologists and geneticists largely ignored the objections, 
>>> forcing a group of linguists–led by Lyle Campbell 
>>> <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Campbell%20L%5Bauth%5D>, 
>>> author of the standard work in that field, /American Indian 
>>> Languages: the Historical Linguistics of Native America,/ and Ives 
>>> Goddard 
>>> <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Goddard%20I%5Bauth%5D>, 
>>> curator at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian 
>>> Institution and the linguistic and technical editor of the massive 
>>> /Handbook of North American Indians/–to write to the /American 
>>> Journal of Human Genetics/ in 2004 and condemn the widespread use of 
>>> pseudo-scientific linguistic “evidence” in genetic studies about 
>>> Indian origins.
>>>
>>> The dispute also led the influential linguist, Johanna Nichols, to 
>>> publish “Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the New 
>>> World,” in the journal /Language /in 1990. In her introduction, she 
>>> first made two important scientific points: the diversity of the 
>>> languages of the New World is due to “the operation of regular 
>>> principles of linguistic geography;” and that the linguistic and 
>>> archaeological evidence from the Sahul clearly contradicted the 
>>> attempts to assign early dates for the Bering Strait migration, 
>>> since the assignment of early dates in the New World would create a 
>>> scientific anomaly; /“/but such a discrepancy–one of at least an 
>>> order of magnitude–must be assumed if we adhere to the Clovis 
>>> [15,000 years ago] or received chronology [20,000 years ago] for the 
>>> settlement of the New World.”
>>>
>>>
>>> Mary Lou and Dan Smoke
>>> Adjunct Professors
>>> Smoke Signals, #3255 SSC
>>> http://london.ctvnews.ca/more/smoke-signals
>>> https://www.facebook.com/#1/ctvsmokesignals
>>> http://www.chrwradio.ca <http://www.chrwradio.ca/>
>>> http://chrwradio.ca/content/smoke-signals
>>> 94.9 FM CHRW
>>> Sundays 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. EST
>>> CHRW 2013 Outstanding Specialty Program
>>> 519 659-4682
>>> 519 661-2111 x85083 for messages
>>> https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/150460689234/ 
>>> <https://www.facebook.com/#%21/groups/150460689234/>
>>> dsmoke at uwo.ca <mailto:dsmoke at uwo.ca>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>



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