Fwd: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor

[Michael McCafferty]

I'm not impressed.

Linguists have been altering the Bering Land Bridge theory for a long 
time, but not throwing it out.



Quoting Richard Preston <prestonr at MCMASTER.CA>:

> cheers
> Dick
>
> http://www.richardpreston.ca/
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Jennifer Preston <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>
>>
>>
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>>> From: Daniel Smoke <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>
>>> Cc: Al Day <aday at namerind.on.ca>, Pam Palmater
>>> <ppalmater at politics.ryerson.ca>, Gary Farmer
>>> <garytroublemaker at gmail.com>, Cyndy Baskin <cbaskin at ryerson.ca>,
>>> Raven Redbird <sfive at rogers.com>, Carrie Lester
>>> <lester.carrie at rogers.com>, Jennifer Preston-Howe
>>> <jennifer at quakerservice.ca>, Ken Deer <kennethdeer104 at hotmail.com>,
>>> Deb Aaaron <debaaron at newcreditfirstnation.com>, Peter Cole
>>> <coyoteandraven at mac.com>, Anita Rooke <arooke at gcna.com>, Ward
>>> Churchill <wardchurchill at yahoo.com>, Blanche Meawassige
>>> <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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>>> http://chrwradio.ca/content/smoke-signals
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>>> dsmoke at uwo.ca
>>>
>>> From: Daniel Smoke <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>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 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
>>> 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
>>>
>>> RELATED: DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait Theory
>>>
>>> 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" 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,
>>> 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, author of the standard work in that field, American
>>> Indian Languages: the Historical Linguistics of Native America, and
>>> Ives Goddard, 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://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/
>>> dsmoke at uwo.ca
>>>
>>>
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