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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
It raises an important point: Almost every square inch of Earth's real estate has belonged to more than one entity historically. Near current borders we might expect more recent changes of ownership (those borders being created more recently).
Lots of groups try to use these historical claims - some going back thousands of years - to assert ownership of various lands. On that basis, there is no end to it; nobody owns or has sovereignty over any land.
I will also observe that the most prosperous and peaceful have fewer borders: Europe is reducing theirs; the US-Canada border is porous (yes, the EU's and US's southern borders obviously complicate this theory). Russia could have had such borders with Europe; instead they chose power and death over prosperity and peace.
Are you suggesting that the best way to deal with ethnic cleansing is to ethnically cleanse in retaliation? If not, then what on earth are you proposing? There is no law of the universe that says there is a tidy, feel-good solution to every moral quandary. You need to stop the ethnic cleansing before it happens, unless you're either prepared to concede the territory or ethnically cleanse it yourself; there is no other solution. It's a terrible situation, so which terrible solution do you prefer?
I’m not proposing anything. I don’t have any simplistic solutions for problems that plagued the Earth since the dawn of civilization. So I wouldn’t jump to claims that everything I disagree with is incoherent.
Putin routinely frames the decisions of his "weak" predecessors as unjust and in need of repair. Hence his justification of the invasion of Ukraine leans heavily on an ideological foundation that Lenin and Krushchev (and probably Gorbachev->Yeltsin) are to blame for its very existence.
He ranted at length about Lenin in his speech on the eve of the invasion, and the talking point that "Crimea isn't Ukrainian it was a gift to them in the Kruschev era!" is all over the place, even by western sympathisers^Wuseful idiots.
I imagine he could frame the Alaska scenario in a similar way, though I doubt he'd actually go that far.
It's a "might makes right" philosophy. Those predecessors were "wrong" because they were weak, and a strong Russia is "right" or will make things "right" through its inherent superiority.
2. What Alexander signed is enough that the US isn't going to give it back, ever. And no Russian government since Alexander II has been in a position where taking Alaska back is a possibility.
Not sure why you're downvoted for this, but it's exactly right.
It's the same reason why liberals in the US remain flummoxed by Trump. You can't prove him wrong, he (and his supporters) doesn't care. It's about might-makes-right in all aspects. The quickly uttered phrase "alternative facts" is more cogent than critics will admit.
In another blustery warning to the U.S., Vyacheslav Volodin, a longtime Putin aide who serves as the speaker of the lower house of parliament, warned Wednesday that Washington should remember that Alaska was part of Russia when it freezes Russian assets. Russia colonized Alaska and established several settlements there until the U.S. purchased it from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million. “When they attempt to appropriate our assets abroad, they should be aware that we also have something to claim back,” Volodin said during a meeting with lawmakers.
