At 10:08 AM 12/13/98 -0800, Michael Price wrote:
>I don't think there'd be one 'original' name, Jerry: it would depend on
>which people you accept as *the* original North Americans.
>
...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.

Traditional dates include about 75,000 - 65,000 BP; 50,000 - 45,000 BP; and
30,000 - 12,000 BP, depending on whom you ask. A related question is when
there was an ice-free corridor for southward expansion by land. Recently
the trend seems to be toward thinking it may have been open several times
for longer periods than was previously thought. Southward migration by sea
is also receiving more attention (see below).

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.

In his last years, Louis Leakey excavated what he interpreted as remains of
campfires amd shelters made by Homo erectus in the Calico mountains of
southern California. I can't recall or find the date of the site, but I
believe it would have been prior to 100,000 BP. Most archeologists are not
convinced by his evidence. I seem to recall that in the last year or so
evidence that H. erectus used boats in southeast Asia was published. It
seems clear that we still have much to learn about H. erectus and their
replacement by H. sapiens. (to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever
suggested that H. habilis, who was earlier than H. erectus, has been found
anywhere but Africa.)


>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.

Michael seems to be referring to the Kennewick man, which gets pretty
regular updates in Seattle newspapers, especially now that it is residing
in the Burke Museum (not on display). I don't recall whose land it was
found on, but I assume it was land controlled by the Army Corps of
Engineers, since it has been in their possesion (and still is from a legal
standpoint). They sought to turn the skeleton, nearly complete and dated to
9000 BC, over to local tribes (5 have claimed it) in accordance with the
Native American Graves Act(sorry, not the exact name). Archeologists, who
consider Kennewick man to be an extremely valuable find because of its
early date and completeness, in addition to the interesting possibility
that it represents an unexpected ethnic type, have sued to be able to study
it. The Asatru society, a group of pagans recreating Germanic traditions,
in what seems to me to be an ironic attempt to inject humor into the
situation, are also claiming the bones as ancestral, based on their
supposed Caucasian features and on the traditions of Vikings in the Americas.
Both Asatru and native American tribes have been permitted to perform
ceremonies over the bones. The whole mess is tied up in court and could
possibly result in an amendment to the law in question. It is hard to see
how any outcome could be relevant to land claims. The history of land grabs
over the last couple of centuries is perfectly clear, and I doubt any
attepts to base anything on hypothetical land claims of 9000 BC would get
far in a court.

What Michael calls "the central myth of native fundamentalism" is taken
very seriously by native Americans I know, who find attempts to tell them
they came over the Bering land bridge offensive, just as they find studying
ancestral bones offensive. In the Kennewick man case, of course, a major
issue is whose ancestor is he? Although I would regard studying bones as a
way of honoring my ancestors, it is scarcely surprising in the light of
history that many Native Americans view certain archeological activities as
more modern attempts to destroy native cultures and traditions.

We could probably take a cue from them in not being too eager to buy into
the Bering land bridge scientific myth. Not that I doubt that some people
arrived in the Americas this way, but the story is growing more complex
daily. For decades the standard myth was that ancestors of Native Americans
came over the Bering land Bridge about 11,500 years ago toward the end of
the last glacial period, and that we could trace their path southward in
the artifacts associated with the Clovis culture. Although many sites older
than 11,500 years have been proposed in the past, none conclusively
convinced archeologists who subscribed to the "Clovis is earliest" myth
until recently. Just this year, even most diehard skeptics have accepted
that the Monte Verde site in Chile is decidedly pre-Clovis. The accepted
dates are around 12,500 - 12,000 BC, but there are controversial dates of
older strata up to 30,000 BP or so. The culture of 12,000 BC is fairly
sophisticated and is quite far from the Bering strait, suggesting that if
these peoples' ancestors came over the Bering strait, it was likely to have
been considerably before 12,000 BC. The Monte Verde culture is a coastal
culture, and the possibility of people migrating along the coasts
independent of whether there was an ice-free corridor on land is getting
more attention these days.

Michael mentions marker genes that tie Native American populations to
Siberian populations. This is true, but again the whole story is more
complicated and far from clear at present. One study in this new research
area sought to support the "three migrations theory", which is based on
dental and (controversial) linguistic evidence suggesting that three
distinct migrations occurred, represented by the Eskimo/Aleut, Na-Dene
(Athapaskan), and Amerindian (all other Native American) liguistic groups.
(the last language grouping is highly controversial). A second genetic
study, however, supported at least four distinct immigrating populations,
if I recall correctly, and it seems clear that both the genetic and
linguistic evidence will be refined and rehashed in the coming years, and
be repeatedly reinterpreted as the dates on more proposed early sites are
accepted. Dates of 30,000 BP and even 60,000 BP have been proposed for
sites in South America. The "Clovis is earliest" myth is dead, but it is
unclear how far back the dates will go. Modern H. sapiens seems to have
spread out of Africa about 100,000 (-200,000) BP. The date that they took
boats to Australia has recently been revised to 60,000 BP from the
long-accepted 40,000 BP. We have much to learn about early human migrations.

>
>>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.

The highly controversial grouping of most Native American languages into a
single family by Greenberg will surely stimulate research into the taxonomy
of Native American languages. Greenberg's methods are controversial, but
all now acknowledge that his previously equally controversial
classification of African languages was right. Whether the name for
"long-tailed duck" is attested in enough of the fast-disappearing Native
American languages to reconstruct an early name (I doubt whether anyone
could ever know the "first" name) remains to be seen.

Paul Talbert
Seattle
tuisto at oz.net

PS I think "ahaaliq" is great. Does anyone know what language it is?