american-holocaust

ON PRE-COLUMBIAN SETTLEMENT AND POPULATION 263thirty different major population movements, by different peoples, extendingback about 50,000 years.A similarly structured debate exists among the linguists. It commonlyis agreed that the people living in the Americas prior to 1492 spoke atleast 1500 to 2000 different languages, and probably hundreds more thathave been lost without a trace. These languages derived from a cluster ofmore than 150 language families-each of them as different from the othersas Indo-European is from Sino-Tibetan. 8 (By comparison, there are only40-odd language families ancestral to Europe and the Middle East.) Somelinguists claim, however, to have located a trio of language families, or"proto-languages," from which that great variety of languages developed:Amerind, Na-Dene, and Eskimo-Aleut. Others contend that these threeproto-languages can be further reduced to a single language that was spokenby one ancestral group that entered North America about 50,000 yearsago-while still others argue that the multitude of Indian languages cannotbe traced to fewer than the 150 known language families, and that thereis no way convincingly to link that knowledge to estimates of the earliesthuman entry into North America. 9Beyond these specific controversies, however, at least one recent study,building on these data and combining language and geographic research,clearly shows that there already was enormous language and geo-culturaldiversity in North America south of the glacial mass during the apex ofthe last Ice Age-that is, between 14,000 and 18,000 years ago. Languageisolates only emerge after very long stretches of time, of course, when aonce unified people have been divided and separated for a sufficient durationto erase any linguistic common denominator between them. And wenow have linguistic maps of North America showing the existence of scoresof independent and mutually unintelligible language groups across the entirecontinent even before the glaciers of the Wisconsin Ice Age began toretreat. Indeed, although the general direction of American Indian migrationwas from north to south and from west to east, it appears that certainlong established, language-identified peoples-such as some Siouan, Caddoan,Algonquian, and Iroquoian speakers-moved north following theglacier ice as it receded. For as the huge frigid barrier slowly melted, invitinglylarge glacial lakes emerged, their clear waters trapped between theice to the north and the southerly high ground, while thick, broadleaf deciduousforests spread northward in the wake of the glaciers' retreat. 10By at least 15,000 B.C., then, native American peoples on the Pacificcoast, in the northern plains, and in the woodlands east of the RockyMountains, were living in what by then were age-old hunting and gatheringsocieties that sustained themselves on herds of caribou, musk oxen,bison, moose, mammoths, and mastodons, as well as a large variety of fishand plant life. At the same time, more than 5000 miles to the southseparatedby deserts, jungles, and mountains, many of them seemingly im-