How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theory
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/19/how-linguists-are-pulling-apart-bering-strait-theory-154063?page=0%2C0
Click link for complete article (It's 6 Internet pages) - excerpts below:
Over the past few weeks, new scientific discoveries have rekindled the
debate over the Bering Strait Theory. Two of the discoveries were
covered recently in Indian Country Today. The first “More Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory,” dealt with the
growing problem of “science by press release,” as scientific studies
hype their conclusions to the point that they are misleading; and the
second, “DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait Theory,” discussed how politics can influence science, and the negative
effects these politically-based scientific results can have on Native
peoples.
Deloria also argued that science, when studying people, was not neutral.
In his view, some scientific theories harbored social and political
agendas that were used to deprive Indians and other minorities of their
rights. Many of the assumptions that underlay certain scientific
principles were based on obsolete religious or social views, and he
urged science to shed these dubious relics. The issue for Deloria was
not science vs. religion (or tradition), it was good science vs. bad
science, and in his view, the Bering Strait Theory was bad science.
Deloria also argued that science, when studying people, was not neutral.
In his view, some scientific theories harbored social and political
agendas that were used to deprive Indians and other minorities of their
rights. Many of the assumptions that underlay certain scientific
principles were based on obsolete religious or social views, and he
urged science to shed these dubious relics. The issue for Deloria was
not science vs. religion (or tradition), it was good science vs. bad
science, and in his view, the Bering Strait Theory was bad science.
One of the 150 New World language stocks, Eskimo-Aleut, also spans the
Arctic and so has Asian and European relatives. Another language super
stock, Na-Dené, composed of the language stocks Athabaskan, Tlingit and
Eyak, and located in Alaska and the northwest coast (but also in the
southwestern U.S.), is also believed to have relatives in Asia, possibly
the Yeneisian languages of central Siberia.
One of America’s greatest scientists, Franz Boas, generally considered
to be the father of modern anthropology and an important linguist in his
own right, in his classic study, Race, Language, and Culture,
published in 1940, wrote that not only were American Indian languages
“so different among themselves that it seems doubtful whether the period
of 10,000 years is sufficient for their differentiation,” but that the
evidence of extremely ancient Indians would some day be found, and that,
“all we can say, therefore, is that the search for early remains must
continue.” Indeed, Boas was among the first to propose, based on the
evidence from an expedition that he led to the Bering Strait region in
1897, the “back migration” from the Americas to Asia.
The dispute also led the influential linguist, Johanna Nichols, to
publish “Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the New
World,” in the journal Language in 1990. In her introduction,
she first made two important scientific points: the diversity of the
languages of the New World is due to “the operation of regular
principles of linguistic geography;” and that the linguistic and
archaeological evidence from the Sahul clearly contradicted the attempts
to assign early dates for the Bering Strait migration, since the
assignment of early dates in the New World would create a scientific
anomaly; “but such a discrepancy–one of at least an order of
magnitude–must be assumed if we adhere to the Clovis [15,000 years ago]
or received chronology [20,000 years ago] for the settlement of the New
World.”
Nichols’ paper used six independent linguistic methods for
calculating American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would
have taken a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian
languages to have evolved from one language, or 35,000 years if migrants
had come in multiple waves. She concluded that, “The unmistakable
testimony of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been
inhabited nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea.”
The advocates of the Bering Strait Theory have countered that the
linguistic evidence, strong as it may be, is not “proof” that Indians
have inhabited the Americas for more than 15,000 years, and granted, it
is not proof, it is evidence. The demand by the proponents of the Bering
Strait Theory for “indisputable proof” is actually a curious but
important aspect of that theory. Science is only rarely able to prove
things with absolute certainty, and it normally confines itself to
mathematical probability. As one scientist put it, “proof is not a
currency of science,” and virtually all widely accepted scientific
theories are based upon the preponderance of the evidence, not proof.
This strident demand for “proof” while ignoring the evidence is abnormal
in science and reflects the fact that originally the Bering Strait
Theory was not a scientific theory at all, but a dogma. And this
dogmatic stance, along with the vicious nature of the debate surrounding
it, has long been a sore point for many scientists, not just for
Indians.
