Telescope Reviews: Native North Americans

There has been recent evidence that there was a comet strike at the end of the last ice age, perhaps over the great lakes, that led to what is called the 'Younger Dryas' event. Burnt material is found at that time horizon all over North America, indicating widespread forest fires. If this actually happened when the continent was already inhabited (by the Clovis people) then they likely would either have been totally wiped out or severely reduced in numbers- their food supply would have gone up in smoke, both vegetal and animal. Later migrants from the Pacific coast and from points south would have filled the blanks in after the environment recovered- several thousand years go by before you see the same sort of population densitites again.

The Zun~i people indeed seem relatively unrelated to others in the region today, though in the past some linguists tried to relate their language to a larger family they call Penutian.

In my own studies of religious vocabulary I found that the Zun~i word for 'singing spell'- a kind of ode to the elements that makes abundance come foodwise, is nearly identical in Yahgan (Tierra del Fuego), Salishan (from the British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho area), and Zun~i, and less but still recognizably so in many other language families along the Pacific coast.

This indicates to me anyway that there was some sort of link to the west. If you look at other families inland there are similar more obvious connections.

For example, the late-arriving Athabaskans, whose primary homeland is Alaska and adjacent Canadian regions, have outliers both in the Great Basin (Navajo, Apache) and along the Pacific coast both in Oregon and California.

The Algonkian language family, which spreads all the way from Colorado to the east coast, has two sister families in California (Yurok and Wiyot).

More controversial groupings at a higher level also seem to link east-west, with the spread eastward to more recent, differentiated varieties, and older, more entrenched ones in the west.

But you see the same thing to the south- where recently expanded families are in the north and the smaller, older ones in the south.

All this indicates an extreme depopulation of the more easterly, northerly lands, later filled in by newer migrants who had little competition and thus weren't hemmed in til much later when population densities rose much higher.

Another example is the northward migration of peoples from the north coast of eastern South America up through the islands- one group whose parent family is in South America made it as far as Florida- and some of the language families of the Gulf state area may have similar recent origins in South America. And the Uto-Aztecans, once thought to have migrated south into Mexico, now appear to have actually migrated north prior to that.

All these things indicate a refill of most of North America after the environment recovered after the comet strike (which of course also links this to CN!)

The Yahgans, BTW, down in Tierra del Fuego (which they may must have migrated to from points further north- and there is plenty of evidence of earlier inhabitants they either killed off or absorbed), have a legend about a great flaming stone falling from the sky which created a gigantic upheaval and tsunami- and that they were the only survivors left when the waters receded. Who knows how old this story is?

Jess Tauber