First languages of North America traced back to two groups from Siberia
phys.org
phys.org
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.
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.
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.
Edit: wiki link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_la...
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
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.
Unless those populations only started using language once they had set foot in North America, which would be an even greater thing to push.
Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395
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.
The Norman contribution to the split between tough, through, and dough, for example, is zero.
Seems odd to publish an extraordinary linguistic claim in the "Journal of Biological Anthropology." Is that a normal place for linguists to publish papers?
(for example: https://www.science.org/content/article/closest-known-ancest... )
(We have evidence for multiple waves from other sources, chiefly haplogroups.)
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).
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.
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.
Living in the high arctic is quite taxing.
https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/news/2016/02/new-evidence...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.