Hi Tweets,

Jerry Converse writes:

>> Lois Shultz writes:
>> >
>> >>Not to throw more fuel on the fire, but perhaps we should be using the
>> >>"original" N. American name for Long-tailed duck: ahaaliq
>
>What is the "original" N. American name?

I don't think there'd be one 'original' name, Jerry: it would depend on
which people you accept as *the* original North Americans.

>About a year ago I seem to recall watching a program on the Discovery Channel
>where some scientist stated that there is now proof that the Native
Americans as
>we know them came over on a land bridge a looong time ago and displaced,and or
>eliminated the "original" inhabitants of N. America.

This is an interesting question: the Bering land bridge has existed twice or
more, I think, during glaciations where ocean levels drop as the water is
increasingly locked up as ice. For the first-crossing peoples using the
first bridge to have wiped out original inhabitants, they would likely have
been early Homo sapiens running up against resident H. habilis. That there's
no record of habilis ever being in North America leads to two possibilities:
no-one's found the evidence or habilis was never here to begin with. If the
latter, then the more recent second wave using the recent land bridge
exterminated or absorbed the first wave sapiens colonisers.

An analogous situation is thought to exist with Golden Eagles Aquila
chrysaetos, where ornithologists have posited two waves of colonisation from
Asia resulting in two behaviorally distinct populations, the more recent
still highly migratory, the other, older one sedentary. To extend the
analogy somwhat gingerly, there may be similar holdovers in human populations.

An interesting sidelight: a few years ago, there was a very nasty little
controversy in which anthropologists working somewhere in Washington State
had discovered a skull in very old strata showing not asian but ancient--not
modern--Caucasian features. Rather than being studied, as the scientists
naturally wanted to do, this skull was promptly impounded and suppressed by
the local Native people (found on their land) since it a) was a direct
challenge to a central myth of native fundamentalism of a sui generis North
American origin (despite the tracing of some marker-genes in contemporary
North American native people back to central Siberian populations) and b)
more to the point, the local nation felt that if it were shown that there
had been a prior E-->W migration, such a finding could only have a
less-than-helpful effect on that nation's land claims. Damn, I'd loved to
have seen a follow-up on this.

>If this is true, I wonder
>what the first "original" people called the duck

A sufficiently-detailed paleolinguistic study might actually be able to
trace back to those first names.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net

"She's psychic....we've decided to find it charming."
--Frasier