Thanks for the intriguing thread, milum! As more discoveries continue to point to earlier human civilization in the Americas, and especially in Central and Southern South America, the old Bering Strait theory of human migration to these continents is now pretty much debunked to my mind (and many others). I'm fascinated and eager to know, now, how civilization came to the Americas and why, with all the accrued wisdom of the peoples here, they never acquired some of the major (yet, simple) stepping-stones to functionality like the wheel.
And as far as the obfuscation of language in antiquity, remeber that the many diverse North American Aboriginie tongues (i.e. Algonquin), while sounding very similar to us, were widely dissimilar to their original speakers. And if the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, emigrated from the North American peoples as per the long-standard Bering Strait theory, why were their ancient tongues so different?
I still think much of the mysteries of antiquity in the Americas disappeared with the Anasazi...(but, perhaps, somehow still waiting to be found)
As for the AD/BC discussion...to my eyes the BCE/CE designation drifted in and out very quickly in usage. It's just that AD/BC became so widely used that it lost its religious connotation and became a generic indicator of an accepted time reference frame. Even as a young practicing Catholic in parochial school who had an advanced interest in paleontology and archaeology, I never thought of AD/BC in religious terms...knew what it stood for in Latin, of course, but that just seemed a curious trivia note for the source of its adoption as a unit of measure. Besides, most other religions have their own calendars to look to for religious dating if they want to...Hebrew, Muslim, Hindu, to name a few. I respectfully disagree, Helen, that the use of AD/BC is some kind of imposition on other religions...it has become a word of its own really, like second, hour, minute, light-year, inch, yard, or foot. All language arises from an original metaphor, so if we follow this reasoning, we would have to go back and strip out or change every word that contains some ancient source of "incorrectness." BP is, however, a widely used and increasingly adopted term for, as milum said, simplifying the dating of antiquity....but the reason for this one is for expediency in calculation, and that is all.
And I find that 4,000 year language "jump" extremely challenging...I've often wondered why we have, for instance, written records erupting at a certain time and place (i.e. the Sumerian's cuneiform), and why there have never been more primitive markings on tablets discovered in caves or Iron Age villages for instance. After all, I surmise that language had to be a process, not some sudden eruption.
