Theories of Indigenous Origin in the Americas

[Smallc]

I contend that the Siberian land bridge theory, as today accepted by most of humanity is the true origin of most if not all of America's Indigenous people. There many have been small groups from other places, but that is controversial. What do you think?

[Guest]

I'm no anthropologist, but I definitely think the first people to settle like what they saw, put down roots, raise a family and stick around for a while here in North America came over the Bering Strait.

[waldo]

I contend that the Siberian land bridge theory, as today accepted by most of humanity is the true origin of most if not all of America's Indigenous people. There many have been small groups from other places, but that is controversial.

controversial? For/to whom? Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas

Discovery Points to Earlier Arrival of First Americans

The peopling of the Americas “was multipronged, stretching over a substantial period of time, involving different migrant groups and entry routes, and diverse ways of life,” Adovasio says. “Florida is about as far from the Bering Strait as you can get in North America. If you’ve got people in Florida 14,500 years ago, at the same time they are in so many parts of the Americas, the simplistic notion of a colonization by rapidly moving, late-arriving population is simply false.”

.

[Smallc]

The land bridge theory hinges on the idea of a channel in the ice, with colonization staring as far back as 23,000 years.

These theories are in competition with other theories, of multi pronged immigration:

In a wide-ranging paper in the journal Science, University of Copenhagen Centre for GeoGenetics Director Eske Willerslev and coauthors studied genomes from ancient and modern people in the Americas and Asia. They concluded that migrations into the New World had to have occurred in a single wave from Siberia, timed no earlier than 23,000 years ago. They also calculated that any genes shared with Australo-Melanesian peoples must have been contributed through relatively recent population mixing.

In the meantime, Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich and colleagues, focusing more closely on the Australo-Melanesian genes in a study published in Nature, came to a different conclusion: that the DNA had to have arrived in the Americas very long ago and that founding migrations occurred in more than one wave.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-native-american-origins-dna-20150721-story.html

I actually find the idea of migration from both the north and the east to be somewhat compelling - far more so than the idea of migration from Europe, as I've seen posited a few times.

Edited June 26, 2016 by Smallc

[Smallc]

More interesting still is the Inuit people, who apparently replaced (killed) the original inhabitants to move there, more than 6,000 years ago:

new study, published in Science, shows that the first people to populate the Arctic regions of North America and Greenland were a group who moved into the area from Siberia around 3,000 B.C. They lived in isolation for almost 4,000 years, before disappearing.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/isolated-culture-thrived-arctic-4000-years-180952505/#jYWsmmP3KgR9910c.99

Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv

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[Guest]

If you’ve got people in Florida 14,500 years ago, at the same time they are in so many parts of the Americas, the simplistic notion of a colonization by rapidly moving, late-arriving population is simply false.”

.

Maybe they were just the elderly?

[?Impact]

I think the only real controversy is the Monte Verde site. The main people to settle North & Central America were from Asia, most likely via an ice bridge although there is a remote possibility they came by boat along the coastline but still the same people.

[Bryan]

Aboriginals with an almost identical culture still exist in Northern Russia, so I don't think there is any controversy at all about where our "aboriginal" people came from. That they probably came over in more than one wave makes a lot of sense. That's a lot of people spread over a really big area. So much so that it's hard to square that the ancient tribes in south america got there via migration from the north, unless it happened many times over as much longer time frame.

If they are all from asia though, we definitely need a different name for them. It seems almost certain now that they are not originally from here.

[Smallc]

No one is originally from here, or most of the rest of the world.

[jacee]

I think the linguistic evidence is as important as the archeology.

Link here:

http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums/topic/25872-jason-kenney-unite-the-right-in-alberta/?p=1169334

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.

...

Nichols paper used six independent linguistic methods for calculating American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would have taken a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian languages to have evolved from one language, or 35,000 years if migrants had come in multiple waves. She concluded that, The unmistakable testimony of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been inhabited nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/19/how-linguists-are-pulling-apart-bering-strait-theory-154063?page=0%2C1

Edited June 27, 2016 by jacee

[jacee]

Aboriginals with an almost identical culture still exist in Northern Russia, so I don't think there is any controversy at all about where our "aboriginal" people came from. That they probably came over in more than one wave makes a lot of sense. That's a lot of people spread over a really big area. So much so that it's hard to square that the ancient tribes in south america got there via migration from the north, unless it happened many times over as much longer time frame.

If they are all from asia though, we definitely need a different name for them. It seems almost certain now that they are not originally from here.

It seems less certain now:

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.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/19/how-linguists-are-pulling-apart-bering-strait-theory-154063?page=0%2C1

Edited June 27, 2016 by jacee

[jacee]

I contend that the Siberian land bridge theory, as today accepted by most of humanity is the true origin of most if not all of America's Indigenous people. There many have been small groups from other places, but that is controversial. What do you think?

Maybe that view is political rather than scientific:

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.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/19/how-linguists-are-pulling-apart-bering-strait-theory-154063?page=0%2C1

[?Impact]

Where did the archaeological evidence go? We are now a century later, and still none have been found to confirm Sapir's contention. Certainly the receding glaciers from the last ice age would have wiped much of it out in the north, but not all as we have many much older archaeological finds like the dinosaurs. Where would the people have gone during the ice age, and would there not be a melding of the diverse languages and cultures as these groups encountered each other along migration routes? The same factors that lowered linguistic diversification in the old world due to extensive trade routes would not necessarily apply to a nomadic population in the new world.

[eyeball]

No one is originally from here, or most of the rest of the world.

Yeah, but it's not like anyone is from Mars either so...quibbling over the details is so 21st century.

[-1=e^ipi]

Wow, is jacee being a science denier now?

'In 1916, someone argued a different position based on linguistic evidence. Linguistic evidence is the best evidence we have!'

Sounds like Ted Cruz, with respect to satellite data.

Archaeological and genetic evidence are in agreement with 'First Nations' descending primarily from the Clovis migration (with a few groups coming earlier than that).

[Guest]

One would think linguistic evidence would be utterly useless.

Edited June 27, 2016 by bcsapper

[TimG]

that Asians may have been the descendants of early American Indian migrations from the Americas to Asia.

ROTFL. Genetic evidence shows that all populations of humans outside of Africa are decedents of a group that left Africa about 200,000 years ago.

[-1=e^ipi]

It's closer to 100,000 than 200,000

[Argus]

Nichols paper used six independent linguistic methods for calculating American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would have taken a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian languages to have evolved from one language,

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. How old is the English language, for example? About fifteen hundred years, I believe. And it's grown from a number of different languages, including German, French, and the languages of the then inhabitants of England, the Angles, Celts and Jutes. There weren't even any European countries 5,000 years ago, yet it's supposed to take 50,000 years to form distinct languages?

[Smallc]

I think the linguistic evidence is as important as the archeology.

No one argues that only one language came over the land bridge. Two languages cut that time in half, and suddenly the timeline fits.

[jacee]

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. How old is the English language, for example? About fifteen hundred years, I believe. And it's grown from a number of different languages, including German, French, and the languages of the then inhabitants of England, the Angles, Celts and Jutes. There weren't even any European countries 5,000 years ago, yet it's supposed to take 50,000 years to form distinct languages?

At least 50,000 years to form as many distinct languages as there were among Indigenous North Americans.

For Indo-European languages, less than 10,000 years, according to this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/map-how-indo-european-languages-evolved-2014-12

Edited June 27, 2016 by jacee

[TimG]

At least 50,000 form as many distinct languages as there were among Indigenous North Americans.

Self serving speculation that cannot be proven one way or another. Even the assertion that there that many 'distinct' languages is a subjective classification that may be influenced by the lack of any written form. For example, all of the dialects of Chinese are very different languages but share a written form so they are called dialects.

OTOH, DNA studies are objective evidence of the relationships between groups of humans and they have been used create a very detailed map of human migration patterns:

http://www.transpacificproject.com/index.php/genetic-research/

So unless you have arguments explain why the DNA evidence is wrong there is really no point in talking about purely subjective 'linguistic' evidence.

[jacee]

Self serving speculation that cannot be proven one way or another. Even the assertion that there that many 'distinct' languages is a subjective classification that may be influenced by the lack of any written form. For example, all of the dialects of Chinese are very different languages but share a written form so they are called dialects.

OTOH, DNA studies are objective evidence of the relationships between groups of humans and they have been used create a very detailed map of human migration patterns:

http://www.transpacificproject.com/index.php/genetic-research/

So unless you have arguments explain why the DNA evidence is wrong there is really no point in talking about purely subjective 'linguistic' evidence.

The haplogroups map in your link notes that in the Americas it is "guesswork".

.

[TimG]

The haplogroups map in your link notes that in the Americas it is "guesswork".

The fact that one chart indicates that uncertainties exist do not undermine the largely objective nature of DNA analysis when compared to subjective 'linguistic analysis'. And even if you take into the uncertainties related to timing of the migration there is very little doubt about the claim that Americans natives came from Asia.

http://www.cell.com/ajhg/abstract/S0002-9297(08)00139-0?cc=y=

Edited June 27, 2016 by TimG

[Moonlight Graham]

Many indigenous people in North America look Asian. So land bridge theory works for me.

End of hyper deep analysis.