Abstract
America was colonized by Asian migrants who moved from northeastern Siberia into North America, either coastally or by an interior route through now-submerged Beringia, and from there spread southward eventually to settle in the entire hemisphere. Linguistic evidence can shed light on when colonization began; whether it was initially coastal, interior, or both; how many distinct populations were involved; and how rapidly the hemisphere was colonized. The time required to generate the historically attested number of languages and language families in the Americas can be estimated; frequencies of structural properties in areally defined linguistic populations can discriminate between populations and point to geographic origins; and attested and straightforwardly reconstructable rates of language spread can be used to estimate rates of migration and demographic spread. On the linguistic evidence, colonization must have begun before the Last Glacial Maximum. There were at least two distinct populations, perhaps corresponding to interior and coastal immigration routes, and in general, coastal immigration seems to have had a stronger and more varied impact on the linguistic population of the Americas than interior immigration did. The immigrants spread at not much over 1 km/year on average (depending on ecology), taking about 7,000 years to reach southern South America. The linguistic dates are robust and based on plentiful and carefully analyzed material, so they cannot be dismissed, although they conflict with the younger ages estimated in genetic, archaeological, and paleoclimatological work.
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Notes
- 1.
Here and below I express all dates in calendar years before present.
- 2.
This could have occurred as soon as the corridor supported enough insect and plant life to function as a flyway for migratory waterfowl.
- 3.
See Note 2: migrations of birds would have signaled to hunters that the flyway led to life-supporting terrain.
- 4.
The distance can be walked, of course, in a few years. At issue here is not human walking speed but rates of migration and ethnic spread.
- 5.
Another apparent sprint is the rapid spread of Clovis fluted points across much of North America in some 200 years, a rate of about 24 km/year (Anderson et al. 2005; Waters and Stafford 2007), but in view of its antiquity and the inherent nature of the archaeological record it is likely that sites from both the earliest and latest ends of its spurt are still to be found. In any event the Clovis culture cannot be connected to any language family, so it cannot be compared to the linguistically based rates used here. Hamilton and Buchanan (2010) give an overall spread rate of 7.6 km/year for the entire Clovis spread.
- 6.
This was a series of beeline migrations to known destinations: “Moving in small raiding parties, … followed the Columbia River across the Plateau and through the Cascades to the Pacific” [southward along either the Cascades or the coast] (Golla 2011:257–258). The other rates cited in this paragraph are from Nichols (2008).
- 7.
Bickel and Nichols (2006) use a geographically based definition of the Pacific Rim area: from Pacific (or Pacific-facing) coast and offshore islands inland up to the far side of the major coast range. Pacific Rim traits are those found with significantly higher frequency in the Pacific Rim population than in the adjacent geographical areas (such as intermontane North America, lowland South America, interior and southern New Guinea). See also Nichols et al. (2013). In this approach the definition of the area and the identification of structural properties typical of it are entirely separate.
- 8.
A few tokens can be expected by chance in any continent: Gil (2011) surveys Africa more densely and finds three tokens, but they have no particular geography. He also includes optional classifiers, which increases the density of attestation in the Pacific Rim and expands the area in the directions of its expansion and migrations from it. In Eurasia, many Turkic languages have optional classifiers; ancestral Turkic originated in the vicinity of Manchuria (Janhunen 1996:216), i.e., in or near the Pacific Rim area, and the trait must reflect that origin.
- 9.
Bickel (2013) and Nichols (2010) on different grounds find that even the most stable structural properties are unlikely to last in detectable frequencies as long as 20,000 years. One or another trait might survive much longer in one or another language, but frequencies among that language’s sisters or neighbors are very unlikely to exceed chance, making it impossible to detect ancient families or ancient areas on the strength of just structural typological properties.
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Acknowledgments
I thank the Embassy of Kazakhstan, the Permanent Delegation of Kazakhstan to UNESCO, and the Harriman Institute (Columbia University) for making possible the second Great Migrations conference, which among other boons suggested some of the new lines of thought in this work. The research reported here was supported in part by the NSF and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig; support for the Autotyp database has additionally been provided by the Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Leipzig, and the University of Zürich.
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Nichols, J. (2015). How America Was Colonized: Linguistic Evidence. In: Frachetti, M., Spengler III, R. (eds) Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15138-0_9
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