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Well now archeologist J.M. Adovasio has written a book entitled The First Americans and chauvinistically subtitled it In pursuit of Archaeology's Greatest Mystery. The greatest mystery is When and Who first populated the Americas. Mr. Adovasio is currently excavating the Meadowcroft Rockshelter site in southwestern Pennsylvania where, to the surprise of everyone, the lower levels recorded human occupancy radiocarbon dates of 16,000 years BP.
Before this dig, and two others in West Virginia and Virginia, the archaeologic smart money was bet on the dictum that Clovis Man, whose distinctive flints were found in North and South America and dated about 11,000 years ago, was the archetype American, the progenitors of the nine hundred language groups of American Indians that were here at the time of the arrival of Columbus.
Now what?
Archaeology, like most scientific pursuits, doesn't like to use the term "maybe". Both sides hurried to line up support from professionals in other fields to make their case.
The question: Are the descendants of Clovis Man the Indians of today?
Mr. Adovasio and those who believed in multiple and early peopling of the New World embraced the possibilities offered by nontraditional linguist Johanna Nichols of the University of California at Berkeley. Among other claims, Ms Nichols says that she can trace languages back beyond the cutoff point of 6,000 years. I quote from the book...
Nichols method has little to do with the traditional linguist's comparison of words and phonemes to find similarities and therefore relationships. Comparative methods have so far left linguists without their holy grail, a single tree from which all languages have branched over time. Instead they are confronted by some two or three hundred separate trees (what Nichols calls "stocks") that are hard to relate one to another. For example, the so-called Indo-European stock has 144 branch languages, all of which can be traced back about 6000 years beyond which is murk. Other stocks have fewer or more member languages; some, such as Korean, Basque, and maybe the language of the Zuni Indians, have only one. How these stocks are related remains enigmatic.
Ms. Nichol's strategy was to use the structure of the languages rather than word comparisons to map the language stocks. The structure of a language ( like verb placement-first, middle or last) tends to last through time, whereas the language built upon it comes and goes. On average, she finds, one new family of languages occurs in a stock every 4,000 years.
I'll explain why Adovasio and Nichol think that this method will help support the idea of man's early entry into the Americas (maybe 30,000 years BP) later, but my question is...
" What could cause a periodic 4,000 year spin off of a new language off an old language stock?"
(yes I know an average is but an average, but so do they. I think she's just plain wrong.)
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Forgive my ignorance, master, but what's BP, other than a brand of gasoline? Before Pennsylvania? Before Piggly-Wiggly? It's bad enough you have to deal with those who insist on using BCE because they won't use BC, or CE for AD.
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I'm not the master, but I know the answer because when I read the other night what milum had written, I looked it up on OneLook. And now presenting BP for those who didn't know it:
Before Present
...and that's a very good abbreviation and concept if you don't like measuring time back to 2000 years ago, and then having to do the addition to go even farther back.
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Thanks Wordwind, we must continually strive to drag Bobyoungblat kicking and screaming into the Twenty-First Century.  My use of the time-designator "BP" was a matter of consistency. It was the preferred unit of measurement in the book that I quote. Besides WW, as you point out, using the phrase 30,000 years ago and then giving a date of 28,000 BC is unnecessarily clumsy. Certainly I agree, Mr. Boby, that the silly substitute of "BCE" for "BC" and "CE" for "AD" is stupid. I think that an accord with past literature and research requires that AD and BC be retained for historical times, and all other designations are just contrived "PC" bullshit.
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since christianity as a religion, is professed by only about 25% of the worlds population, i think it is rude to insist on BC/AD for dates. its enough that common calendars start with a date close to the year jesus was born.
Before the Common Era and Common Era, are simple, and non religious based.
BP (before the present) is nice too. i don't think it is necessary for us to go around saying 2002 AD-latin for 'year of the lord' -- its certainly not the year of the lord for muslems, or for budists, or for shinto beleivers, many who, for business purposes, are forced into using western date notation.
curiously, the japanese still use their old style of dating for many purposes.. my brother inlaw was born 18/8/3 (the eighteenth day of the eight month, (august) in the third year of the emperors reign.)-- the Japanese didn't have proper name for months, they just numbered them, so they found it very easy to convert to western numbers, even to a point of starting with january, and not with the old lunar new year used by most of that part of the world. they manage even though the western calendar has a slightly different number of day to a month. but legal dates, like birthdays, wedding, deaths, are still measured by the year of the emperor.
(my neice was born 15/8/3-- and he father teases her that she is older than he is by three days. -new emperor.)
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Milo asks: "What could cause a periodic 4,000 year spin off of a new language off an old language stock?"The only thing I can speak to is Korean, mentioned at the end of the quote from the book... that was a purely nationalistic maneuver on the part of King Sejong - Koreans already had a spoken language, which incorporates a lot of structure from Chinese and Japanese - and strangely, is related to Finnish, although I don't remember how. This King fashioned a phonetic alphabet that's used to this day - all words are broken down into syllables, and the phonetic sounds of the syllables are written into syllabic blocks. I found it quite easy to learn to read Korean - I probably had it down after about 2 months there. Understanding the words I was reading was quite another matter, but at least I could tell a pharmacy from a whorehouse.  Another side-note on Korean: certain Chinese characters are still used in the written language, although I don't know what criteria they used for determining what stays and what goes. Korean is obviously easier to learn to read and write than Chinese ~ accounting for South Korea's preternaturally high literacy rate ~ but you won't see anything but the Chinese character to indicate "teahouse", for example. There are other concepts for which they only employ the Chinese character, but teahouse is the only one I remember...
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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.
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What will become of today's BP dates as Time Marches On? Some fixed point
should be chosen. But which one?
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What will become of today's BP dates as Time Marches On?
So far, dates that get a BP are generally far enough back and have a large enough margin of error for it not to matter whether they are 40,000 BP or 40,100 BP.
I do find the subject of this thread and the idea of a different way of relating languages quite interesting. However, I have a gut feeling that this syntactic structure thing is either being oversimplified or overly simplistic. English itself has, in the last thousand years, changed from a synthetic language in which word order was not very important to an analytic language in which it does. In the last five hundred years it has changed from one with a subject/verb/direct object/indirect object word order to one with a subject/verb/indirect object/direct object order.
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Here's a look at the Anasazi language from a wonderful and fascinating site about them called Sipapu: The Anasazi Emergence Into the Cyber World http://sipapu.gsu.edu/(and there's a link there about Anasazi architecture, Jazzo): from the site: [What is a "Sipapu"? Pueblo histories and religion recognize two kinds of sipapus: The first is the original sipapu, through which First People entered the current world from the Third or Lower World (with the flute-playing Locust leading the way). Different Pueblo groups have different views as to where the original sipapu is located. Pueblos believe that the dead pass into the spirit world through the sipapu. Once upon a time, the dead would have been able to reemerge after a few days and their bodies revived, but Pueblo history says that Coyote covered the sipapu with a stone, and now only spirits, such as the kachinas, can pass through sipapus. The second kind of sipapu is a current passage to the Third World, which can be found as small holes or even more elaborate structures in kivas. Special bodies of water or even special places in the landscape are also often considered to be sipapus. These sipapus are the means of communication with the spirits.] LANGUAGE CITATION: >Did The Anasazi have a written language of any kind or keep any records of their life? What language was spoken? No, the Anasazi did not have any written language; in fact, none of the prehistoric inhabitants of North America above Mexico had any writing in the sense of being able to convey complex messages using a common set of known symbols. However, the Anasazi did leave behind a lot of rock art: petroglyphs pecked or carved into rock and pictographs painted onto rock. The images are most often representative rather than completely abstract, although abstract forms do appear, and many of the images appear to represent unreal entities. Anasazi rock art no doubt had important meanings to the Anasazi, and may have even been used to convey various messages. However, determining these meanings is a very difficult task for archaeologists. A few scholars have pursued innovative studies in which living Pueblo descendents of the Anasazi are queried for rock art meanings, under the assumption that Pueblo interpretations of the symbols would be very similar to the Anasazi's own meanings. Using this approach, for example, specific symbols have been associated with specific Pueblo clans, which in turn suggests that the Anasazi were using the symbols to indicate similar clan organizations. This approach has its problems, but it is so far the best way to interpret what the Anasazi might have been conveying with their rock art (besides saying "it sort of looks like a bug, or an alien, or whatever"!). In a similar vein, there are also various symbols that the Anasazi used on pottery or basketry. In many cases, these are same symbols that are seen in the rock art, and accordingly attempts to interpret them have relied on direct analogy between the living Pueblos and their Anasazi ancestors. Regarding the spoken language of the Anasazi, the probable descendents of the Anasazi--the Pueblo Indians who live in the Southwest today--speak a variety of different languages, some of which are not related to one another at all. The problem is that in prehistoric times, just as today, people moved around a lot, and during some particularly momentous times, there were mass migrations that often brought people from other regions into the northern Southwest where they began to live with the Anasazi. So, for example, the Zuni Indians of today may speak a language that has its roots in southern Arizona among non-Anasazi people. The Hopi, similarly, may have gained their language through in-migration of people from the Great Basin area of Utah and Nevada. This is an area of research that is still wide open!<
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