LiveScience has a dramatic development in a field I don’t think I’d ever considered: Linguistic archaeology. A historical linguist from UC Berkeley has used a language model to determine that the earliest Americans didn’t come in a steady stream from Siberia, but probably arrived in four distinct waves of settlers:
…Johanna Nichols, a historical linguist at the University of California Berkeley, analyzed structural features of 60 languages from across the U.S. and Canada, which revealed they come from two main language groups that entered North America in at least four distinct waves.
Nichols surveyed 16 features of these languages, including syllable structure, the gender of nouns and the way consonants are produced when speaking. The languages split into two main groups: an early one where the first-person pronoun has an “n” sound while the second-person pronoun has an “m” sound, and a later group with languages that incorporate a sentence’s worth of information in just one word.
Further linguistic analysis indicated that people arrived in the Americas in four distinct waves. The first occurred around 24,000 years ago, when massive glaciers covered much of North America. Nichols found no unique language features, suggesting a diverse set of people and languages entered North America at that time. A second wave of people around 15,000 years ago brought languages with n-m pronouns, while a third wave 1,000 years later brought languages with simple consonants. A fourth wave around 12,000 years ago then brought complex consonants.
Until relatively recently, researchers assumed that Indigenous people first arrived in the Americas via a land bridge from Siberia around 13,000 years ago. But Nichols’ previous study of the linguistic data convinced her that this was not enough time for the nearly 200 Indigenous American languages to develop: Instead, she proposed people first arrived closer to 35,000 years ago.
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You can read more of Nichols’ research here, in the Journal of Biological Anthropology.