How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor

[Danielle E. Cyr]

Worth to mention: 

1- Language changes are faster at the centre of a linguistic area than farther away from the centre. The European migrations into the New World demonstrate it quite clearly. Same with Icelandic compared to Norwegian. Although some of us may think that this notion doesn't apply to Aboriginal languages, my view is different. For instance, the Mi'gmaq spoken in Listuguj, QC, is more advanced than that of, say Burnt Church, NB. Listuguj was considered the centre (i.e. major hub) of the Northern Mi'gmaq area and the phonetic erosion there is way more advanced than at the periphery.

2- As research in the domain of grammaticalization shows very clearly, grammatical change is absorbed by different speakers at different speeds.

These two facts allow us to assume that language change, although constantly in action through time, is very uneven in space and among groups of individuals.

Best to All,
Danielle E.



>---- Original Message ----
>From: John Steckley <John.Steckley at HUMBER.CA>
>To: ALGONQUIANA at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>Sent: Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 6:24 PM
>Subject: Re: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor
>
>Michael:
>
>I like the coastal migration model for the first folks here, possibly coming up from Southeast Asia, as some geneticists suggest,  but that's not what the writers were saying.  They worked  very hard at not saying what their theory was.  But I have never believed, as there has never been any evidence backing it up, that major language change operates at a uniform rate.  But then I also don't believe that long term genetic mutation happens at a uniform rate, as that is often assumed but never proven.  Glottochronology has always had a little too much of the assuming behind it for me to take it seriously.  Language changes most and fastest when major social events happen, like intense contact, separation and long trail migration.  And who is to say that the language change happened in the Americas.  It is just as likely that that diversity existed in Asia before they came here.  There is no proof either way as yet.
>
>John
>
>________________________________________
>From: Michael McCafferty [mmccaffe at indiana.edu]
>Sent: August-18-14 6:11 PM
>To: Algonquian Conference List; John Steckley
>Cc: ALGONQUIANA at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>Subject: Re: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor
>
>The Pacific Coastal migration model has been around for quite a while.
>James Dixon is a well known figure in explaining this path into the
>Americas. There's good evidence that even during glacial maxima there
>were ice free coastal zones where bears and humans could and did live,
>as well of course other sea mammals. The isotopic signature for the
>bone of a young man discovered in one of Dixon's digs was the same as
>that of a seal. People were drawing their protein from the sea.
>
>The earliest migrants may have come out of Asia during not the recent
>glacial maximum 14,000 years ago or so but the *previous* glacial
>maximum, ca. 35,000 years ago, and in fact are thought to be of the
>original migrants *into* Asia. (See Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave Man, et
>al.). I haven't talked to all linguists, but I think there may be a
>somewhat shared sense that it would take a good 40,000 years for the
>American linguistic diversification to have taken place, not counting
>new migrants.
>
>Michael McCafferty
>
>Quoting John Steckley <John.Steckley at HUMBER.CA>:
>
>> Unfortunately, this reads like a creationist story.  It makes
>> reference to old works, such as that of Jefferson, who was hardly a
>> scholar on the subject.  The  language diversity  in Australia is
>> greatest in the northern points where new peoples entered.  There is
>> nothing dramatic about saying that 60,000 years ago there were people
>> there.  That has been known archaeologically for at least 20 years.
>> Africa has far greater language diversity than the Americas, but then
>> anatomically modern Homo sapiens has been there for over 100,000
>> years.  There might be a small backwards movement to Asia but the
>> evidence archaeologically and linguistically is weak.
>>
>>
>>
>> The worst part of this is that no counter idea is proposed to Bering
>> Strait.  I suspect that they want to say that people have 'always
>> been here' which is a form of creationism.  We are all Africans, and
>> people who think differently do not know their science and want to be
>> treated as somehow specially created.  Unfortunately, in this case
>> where there is Smoke there is only the fire of creationism that does
>> not want to speak its name.
>>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: ALGONQUIANA [ALGONQUIANA at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] on behalf
>> of Richard Preston [prestonr at MCMASTER.CA]
>> Sent: August-18-14 3:22 PM
>> To: ALGONQUIANA at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>> Subject: Fwd: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theor
>>
>> cheers
>> Dick
>>
>> http://www.richardpreston.ca/
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>> Fsrom: 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
>> 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/
>> 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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> [http://d1jrw5jterzxwu.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/article_media/lingusitic-families-of-american-indians-powell.jpg]
>> 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/
>> dsmoke at uwo.ca<mailto:dsmoke at uwo.ca>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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