Issue of
November 11, 1998
 
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Linguistic evidence
suggests Native Americans may have come from Siberia
BY LISA TREI
The ancestors of some
Native American tribes may have migrated from Siberia,
according to a new study that for the first time links
two language families on both continents.
An article published in
the Nov. 10 Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences titled "The Origin of the
Na-Dene," by human biology lecturer Merritt Ruhlen,
provides linguistic evidence that the Yeniseian family of
languages, spoken in central Siberia, is related to the
Na-Dene language family, which is mostly spoken in
northwestern North America. Previously, each language
family was considered to be an "isolate," with
no known relatives among the world's past and present
languages.
According to the article,
Ruhlen's hypothesis locates the source of one of the
three human migrations that peopled the Americas.
"The implication of this proposal for pre-history is
that the Na-Dene represent a distinct migration from Asia
to the Americas," he writes. This probably took
place about 7,000 years ago, after the first migration of
Amerinds around 11,000 years ago and before the
Eskimo-Aleuts arrived about 3,000 years ago.
"I'm interested in
how everybody got where they got to in the world,"
said Ruhlen, who earned a doctorate in linguistics from
Stanford in 1973 and has studied language classification
for 20 years. "This unravels one little bit of human
pre-history. It simply connects two populations together
that never had been connected before." Ruhlen said
he came across the connection between the two families
while working on other research in Stanford's Green
Library. "I just happened to bump into it," he
said. Ruhlen has not done fieldwork in either region.
The article explains that
the Yeniseian family consists of one surviving language,
Ket, which is still spoken by about 550 people in Central
Siberia. Five other related languages became extinct in
the 19th century. The Na-Dene family has four branches,
three of which are single languages Haida, Tlingit,
Eyak that are spoken on the coastline of western
Canada and southern Alaska. The fourth branch is the
Athabaskan family, spread over interior Alaska and
western Canada. It also extends to the Pacific coast of
Oregon and California and to the American Southwest where
it includes Navajo and Apache.
Ruhlen's research includes
36 sets of similar-meaning words having to do with basic
vocabulary such as "children" and
"hunger," in addition to words for body parts
such as "foot," flora and nature such as
"lake" and "birch bark," fauna such
as "deer" and cultural artifacts such as
"boat."
"It is difficult to
imagine that similarities of this nature could exist
between language families that do not share a common
origin," Ruhlen argues. He rules out other possible
explanations: "Borrowing is excluded because there
is no evidence that people speaking the Yeniseian and
Na-Dene languages have ever been in contact; onomatopoeia
is ruled out because the terms are clearly not sound
symbolic; and chance is ruled out by simple probability.
Two language families might share one or two accidental
resemblances, but they would not share 36, so the only
plausible explanation for these resemblances is common
origin." SR
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