The Bering land bridge, or Beringa, allowed ancient people to cross from Siberia into North America, colonizing the New World for the first time in history. But did cultures on the temporary land bridge learn to speak a common language? This may have been the case, according to a new study of the way each culture talks.
Mark Sicoli of Georgetown University and Gary Holton from the University of Alaska ran an evolutionary analysis of languages spoken on each side of the Bering Strait. More than 40 different languages were part of the study.
As languages slowly evolve, linguistic patterns follow human migrations. The study compared Yeniseian languages of Central Siberia to Na-Dene, a group of native North American languages. These two tongues may stem from a proto-language, each members of a newly-proposed family of languages, called Dené-Yeniseian.
Researchers concluded from the linguistics study that as travelers moved out of Beringa, some groups traveled east, and founded the first Native American civilizations. Others went back west, settling back in eastern Asia.
"[W]e used computational phylogenetic methods to impose constraints on possible family tree relationships modeling both an Out-of-Beringia hypothesis and an Out-of-Asia hypothesis and tested these against the linguistic data. We found substantial support for the out-of-Beringia dispersal adding to a growing body of evidence for an ancestral population in Beringia before the land bridge was inundated by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age," Sicoli said.
One of the questions puzzling archeologists is what took people so long to travel from Asia to the New World. Humans began the migration 25,000 years ago, but the oldest-known Native American relics are just 15,000 years old. A growing body of evidence is suggesting people may have stayed up to 100 centuries on the land bridge. Investigators are still uncertain what caused the pause in migration, or why it started once more. However, core samples recovered from the area suggested Beringa was filled with life and fertile land, while Alaska was icebound. Pollen and other evidence from that era suggest abundant agriculture.
"Our results support that a Dene-Yeniseian connection more likely represents radiation out of Beringia with back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America," researchers wrote in the article announcing the results of their study.
Details of this linguistic analysis are profiled in the online journal, Plos One.
