Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/s...pagewanted=all

Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: July 11, 2012


North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada.

Some scientists assert that the Americas were peopled in one large migration from Siberia that happened about 15,000 years ago, but the new genetic research shows that this central episode was followed by at least two smaller migrations from Siberia, one by people who became the ancestors of today’s Eskimos and Aleutians and another by people speaking Na-Dene, whose descendants are confined to North America. The research was published online on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The finding vindicates a proposal first made on linguistic grounds by Joseph Greenberg, the great classifier of the world’s languages. He asserted in 1987 that most languages spoken in North and South America were derived from the single mother tongue of the first settlers from Siberia, which he called Amerind. Two later waves, he surmised, brought speakers of Eskimo-Aleut and of Na-Dene, the language family spoken by the Apache and Navajo.

But many linguists who specialize in American languages derided Dr. Greenberg’s proposal, saying they saw no evidence for any single ancestral language like Amerind. “American linguists made up their minds 25 years ago that they wouldn’t support Greenberg, and they haven’t changed their mind one whit,” said Merritt Ruhlen, a colleague of Dr. Greenberg, who died in 2001.

The new DNA study is based on gene chips that sample the entire genome and presents a fuller picture than earlier studies, which were based on small regions of the genome like the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. Several of the mitochondrial DNA studies had pointed to a single migration.

A team led by David Reich of Harvard Medical School and Dr. Andres Ruiz-Linares of University College London reported that there was a main migration that populated the entire Americas. They cannot date the migration from their genomic data but accept the estimate by others that the migration occurred around 15,000 years ago. This was in the window of time that occurred after the melting of great glaciers that blocked passage from Siberia to Alaska, and before the rising waters at the end of the last ice age submerged Beringia, the land bridge between them.

They also find evidence for two further waves of migration, one among Na-Dene speakers and the other among Eskimo-Aleut, again as Dr. Greenberg predicted. But whereas Dr. Greenberg’s proposal suggested that three discrete groups of people were packed into the Americas, the new genome study finds that the second and third waves mixed in with the first. Eskimos inherit about half of their DNA from the people of the first migration and half from a second migration. The Chipewyans of Canada, who speak a Na-Dene language, have 90 percent of their genes from the first migration and some 10 percent from a third.

It is not clear why the Chipewyans and others speak a Na-Dene language if most of their DNA is from Amerind speakers. Dr. Ruiz-Linares said a minority language could often dominate others in the case of conquest; an example of this is the ubiquity of Spanish in Latin America.

If the genetics of the early migrations to the Americas can be defined well enough, it should in principle be possible to match them with their source populations in Asia. Dr. Greenberg had argued on linguistic grounds that the Na-Dene language family was derived from Ket, spoken by the Ket people in the Yenisei valley of Siberia. But Dr. Reich said there was not yet enough genomic data from Asia or the Americas to make these links. His samples of Na-Dene and Ket DNA did not match, but the few Ket samples he had may have become mixed with DNA from people of other ethnicities, so the test, in his view, was inconclusive.

The team’s samples of Native American genomes were drawn mostly from South America, with a handful from Canada. Samples from tribes in the United States could not be used because the existing ones had been collected for medical reasons and the donors had not given consent for population genetics studies, Dr. Ruiz-Linares said. Native Americans in the United States have been reluctant to participate in inquiries into their origins. The Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society wrote recently to all federally recognized tribes in the United States asking for samples, but only two agreed to give them, said Spencer Wells, the project director.

Interracial marriage — or admixture, as geneticists call it — may have distorted earlier efforts to trace ancestry because subjects assumed to be American may have had European or other DNA admixed in their genomes. Dr. Reich and his colleagues have developed a method to define the racial origin of each segment of DNA and have found that on average 8.5 percent of Native American DNA belongs to other races. They then screened these admixed sections out of their analysis.

Archaeologists who study Native American history are glad to have the genetic data but also have reservations, given that several of the geneticists’ conclusions have changed over time. “This is a really important step forward but not the last word,” said David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University, noting that many migrations may not yet have shown up in the genetic samples. Michael H. Crawford, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, said the paucity of samples from North America and from coastal regions made it hard to claim a complete picture of early migrations has been attained.

“Sometimes the statisticians make wonderful interpretations, but you have to be very guarded,” he said.
The geneticists’ finding of a single main migration of people who presumably spoke a single language at the time confirms Dr. Greenberg’s central idea that most American languages are descended from a single root, even though the genetic data cannot confirm the specific language relationships he described.

“Many linguists put down Greenberg as rubbish and don’t believe his publications,” Dr. Ruiz-Linares said. But he considers his study a substantial vindication of Dr. Greenberg. “It’s striking that we have this correspondence between the genetics and the linguistics,” he said.

Quote:

---

Posted in reply to the post by geomancer:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/s...pagewanted=all

Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: July 11, 2012

North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada.

Some scientists assert that the Americas were peopled in one large migration from Siberia that happened about 15,000 years ago, but the new genetic research shows that this central episode was followed by at least two smaller migrations from Siberia, one by people who became the ancestors of today’s Eskimos and Aleutians and another by people speaking Na-Dene, whose descendants are confined to North America. The research was published online on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The finding vindicates a proposal first made on linguistic grounds by Joseph Greenberg, the great classifier of the world’s languages. He asserted in 1987 that most languages spoken in North and South America were derived from the single mother tongue of the first settlers from Siberia, which he called Amerind. Two later waves, he surmised, brought speakers of Eskimo-Aleut and of Na-Dene, the language family spoken by the Apache and Navajo.

But many linguists who specialize in American languages derided Dr. Greenberg’s proposal, saying they saw no evidence for any single ancestral language like Amerind. “American linguists made up their minds 25 years ago that they wouldn’t support Greenberg, and they haven’t changed their mind one whit,” said Merritt Ruhlen, a colleague of Dr. Greenberg, who died in 2001. .

---

[More below on Greenberg. Years ago I read a fascinating book by one of his students, Merritt Ruhlen: "The Origin of Language, Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue" Highly recommended]

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/01/science/scientist-at-work-joseph-h-greenberg-what-we-all-spoke-when-the-world-was-young.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

See also: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711134710.htm

SCIENTIST AT WORK: JOSEPH H. GREENBERG; What We All Spoke When the World Was Young

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: February 01, 2000

In the beginning, there was one people, perhaps no more than 2,000 strong, who had acquired an amazing gift, the faculty for complex language. Favored by the blessings of speech, their numbers grew, and from their cradle in the northeast of Africa, they spread far and wide throughout the continent.

One small band, expert in the making of boats, sailed to Asia, where some of their descendants turned westward, ousting the Neanderthal people of Europe and others east toward Siberia and the Americas.
These epic explorations began some 50,000 years ago and by the time the whole world was occupied, the one people had become many. Differing in creed, culture and even appearance, because their hair and skin had adapted to the world's many climates in which they now lived, they no longer recognized one another as the children of one family. Speaking 5,000 languages, they had long forgotten the ancient mother tongue that had both united and yet dispersed this little band of cousins to the four corners of the earth.

https://nytimes.perfectmarket.com/pm/images/pixel.gif
So might read one possible account of human origins as implied by the new evidence from population genetics and archaeology. But the implication that all languages are branches of a single tree is a subject on which linguists appear strangely tongue-tied.

Many deride attempts to reconstruct the family tree of languages beyond the most obvious groupings like the Romance languages and Indo-European. Their argument is that language changes too fast for its roots to be traced back further than a few thousand years. If any single language ever existed, most linguists say, it is irretrievably lost.

But one scholar in particular, Dr. Joseph H. Greenberg of Stanford University, has defied this ardent pessimism. In the course of a long career, he has classified most of the world's languages into just a handful of major groups.

Though it remains unclear how these superfamilies may be related to one another, he has identified words and concepts that seem common to them all and could be echoes of a mother tongue.

And this month, at the age of 84, Dr. Greenberg is publishing the first of two volumes on Eurasiatic, his proposed superfamily that includes a swath of languages spoken from Portugal to Japan.

Like the biologist E. O. Wilson, Dr. Greenberg is that rare breed of academic, a synthesizer who derives patterns from the work of many specialists, an exercise the specialists do not always welcome. But though biologists came to acknowledge the pioneering value of Dr. Wilson's work, linguists have reached no such consensus on that of Dr. Greenberg.

Will he one day be recognized as having done for language what Linnaeus did for biology, as his Stanford colleague and associate Dr. Merritt Ruhlen believes, or is his work more fit, as one critic has urged, to be ''shouted down''?

Dr. Greenberg is by no means an outcast from his profession. He is one of the very few linguists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences, the country's most exclusive scientific club. His work on language typology (universal patterns of word order) is highly regarded. Somewhat puzzlingly, his fellow linguists generally accept his work on the relationships among African languages but furiously dispute his ordering of American Indian languages, even though both classifications were achieved with the same method.

Dr. Greenberg's work is of considerable interest to population geneticists trying to reconstruct the path of early human migrations by means of genetic patterning in different peoples. Although genes and languages are not bequeathed in the same way, both proceed in a series of population splits.

''We have found a lot of significant correspondences between what he says and what we see genetically,'' said Dr. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a leading population geneticist at Stanford. In his view, the majority of linguists are not interested in the evolution of language. They ''have attacked Greenberg cruelly, and I think frankly there is some jealousy behind it because he has been so successful,'' Dr. Cavalli-Sforza said.

In a windowless office lined with grammars and dictionaries of languages from all over the world, Joseph Greenberg fishes in the plastic shopping bag that is serving as his briefcase. He pulls out one of the handwritten notebooks that are the key to his method of discovering language relationships. Down the left hand margin is a list of the languages being compared. Along the top are names of the vocabulary words likely to yield similarities.

His method, which he calls mass or multilateral comparison, is to compare many languages simultaneously on the basis of 300 core words in the hope that they will sort themselves into clusters representative of their historical development. Many linguists believe such an exercise is futile because words change too quickly to preserve any ancestry older than 5,000 years or so.

''They sell their own subject short,'' Dr. Greenberg says. ''Certain items in language are extremely stable, like personal pronouns or parts of the human body.''

Born in Brooklyn in 1915, he was interested in language almost from birth. His father spoke Yiddish and his mother's family German. ''I was brought up to believe Yiddish was an inferior language because my father's relatives got invited to the house as seldom as possible,'' he said. Hebrew school exposed him to a fourth language. He had a good enough ear that an alternative career as a professional pianist beckoned.
But anthropology won out. After doctoral studies at Northwestern, he did fieldwork on the pagan cults of the Hausa-speaking people of northern Nigeria before deciding that his true interest lay in linguistics.

At the time, there was no agreement on the history of African languages. ''So I started in a simple-minded way,'' Dr. Greenberg said. ''I took common words in a number of languages and saw if the languages fell into groups.'' He found that he could reduce all the continent's languages first to 14 and later to 4 major clusters.

In a 1955 article, he described these as Afro-Asiatic, which includes the Semitic languages of Arabic and Hebrew, as well as ancient Egyptian, and is spread across Northern Africa; Nilo-Saharan, a group of languages spoken in Central Africa and the Sudan; Khoisan, which includes the click languages of the south; and Niger-Kordofanian, a superfamily that includes everything in between, including the pervasive Bantu languages.

After a decade of controversy, Dr. Greenberg's African classification became widely accepted. ''But then a lot of people said I had gotten the correct results with the wrong method,'' he said.

Method is the formal issue that divides Dr. Greenberg from his critics. They say that the only way to prove that a group of languages is related is by establishing regular rules governing how words change as one language morphs into another. The 'p' sounds in ancestral Indo-European, for example, change predictably into 'f' in German and English. Mere similarities between the words in different languages, like those on which Dr. Greenberg relies, fall far short of proof, his critics say, because the similarities could arise from chance or borrowing.

Because of the looseness of sound and meaning that Dr. Greenberg allows in claiming similarities, his data ''do not rise above the level of chance,'' said Dr. Sarah Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Brian D. Joseph of Ohio State University, who studies Nostratic, a proposed language superfamily similar to Euroasiatic, described Dr. Greenberg as ''a romantic'' for believing his methods could retrieve long lost languages.

Dr. Lyle Campbell, of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of a textbook on historical linguistics, said that rigorous proof was necessary because languages changed so fast, and that Dr. Greenberg's methods were ''woefully inadequate.''

To Dr. Greenberg and his colleague Dr. Ruhlen, the critics' requirement for establishing regular rules of sound change defies both common sense and history. The sound regularities in Indo-European, they say, were not detected until after the languages had been grouped by inductive methods similar to Dr. Greenberg's. The insistence on demonstrating sound-change regularities, in their view, has thwarted any further reconstruction of language families.

''It's a misguided perfectionism that is so perfect they have had no result,'' Dr. Ruhlen said. His and Dr. Greenberg's aim is to establish the probable links from which the full history of human language can be inferred.

''The ultimate goal,'' Dr. Greenberg said in concluding his 1987 book ''Language in the Americas'' (Stanford University Press), ''is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family. The implications of such a classification for the origin and history of our species would, of course, be very great.''
Because the Americas have been inhabited only recently, at least as compared with Africa, it would be surprising to find a larger number of language groups, and Dr. Greenberg decided there were only three, even though other linguists posit 100 or so independent stocks.

Amerind is the vast superfamily to which, in his view, most native languages of North and South America belong. The other two clusters are Na-Dene, a group of languages spoken mostly in Alaska and northeast Canada, and Eskimo-Aleut, spoken across northern Alaska and Canada.

One striking feature that unites the Amerindian languages of both Americas, in Dr. Greenberg's view, is the use of words starting in 'n' to mean I/mine/we/ours and words beginning in 'm' to mean thou/thine/you/ yours. Not every language shows this pattern, but almost every Amerindian language family has one or more languages that have it, suggesting that all are derived from an original language in which first and second person pronouns started this way.

In the course of classifying the languages of the Americas, Dr. Greenberg realized that their major families were related to languages on the Eurasian continent, as would be expected if the Americas had been inhabited by people migrating through Siberia. Na-Dene, for example, is related to an isolated Siberian language known as Ket.

To help with the American classification, Dr. Greenberg started making lists of words in languages of the Eurasian land mass, particularly personal pronouns and interrogative pronouns.

''I began to see when I lined these up that there is a whole group of languages through northern Asia. I must have noticed this 20 years ago. But I realized what scorn the idea would provoke and put off detailed study of it until I had finished the American languages book,'' he said.

Thirteen years later, Dr. Greenberg has now classified most of the languages of Europe and Asia into the superfamily he calls Eurasiatic. Its seven living components are Indo-European (examples are English, Russian, Greek, Iranian, Hindu); Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish); Altaic (Turkish, Mongolian); the Korean-Japanese-Ainu group; Eskimo-Aleut; and two Siberian families known as Gilyak and Chukotian.

His concept of Eurasiatic was derived independently but overlaps with the proposed Nostratic superfamily, the theory of which has been developed in the last 30 years by Russian linguists.

At first sight it may seem hard to believe that languages as different as English and Japanese, say, share any commonalities. But in his new book on the grammar of Eurasiatic (a second volume on vocabulary is in progress), Dr. Greenberg has found many elements that he argues knit the major Eurasian language families into a single group.

Words beginning in 'm,' for example, are found in every Eurasiatic family to designate the first person (English: me; Finnish: mina; proto-Altaic: min; Old Japanese: mi). Every branch of Eurasiatic, Dr. Greenberg says, uses n-words to designate a negative, from the no/not of English to the -nai ending that makes Japanese verbs negative.

Every branch uses 'k' sounds to indicate a question. In Indo-European, many Latin interrogatives begin qu-, as in quid pro quo. In Finnish, -ko is added to a verb to indicate a question. In Japanese the same role is played by -ka. The word for 'who?' is kim in Turkish, kin in Aleut.

If Dr. Greenberg's Eurasiatic proposal is at first no more favorably received than his Amerindian classification, he will not be surprised. ''A fair part of my publications is just polemics,'' he says, with an air of resignation.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ruhlen believes that if the Eurasiatic grouping is accepted, the world's 5,000 languages can be seen to fall into just 12 superfamilies.

How these in turn might be related to a single mother tongue remains to be seen. But several years ago, Dr. Greenberg identified a possible global etymology derived from the universal human habit of holding up a single finger to denote one.

In the Nilo-Saharan languages the word tok, tek or dek means one. The stem tik means finger in Amerind, one in Sino-Tibetan, 'index finger' in Eskimo and 'middle finger' in Aleut. And an Indo-European stem deik, meaning to point, is the origin of daktulos, digitus, and doigt -- Greek, Latin and French for finger -- as well as the English word digital.

No one has pointed more clearly at the one language than Joseph Greenberg.

Richard, you are truly a cunning linguist.

:Yinyangv: