Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett Read Free Book Online Page A

always been the home of small bands of hunter-gatherers. Consistent with this view is the idea of some linguists, especially the late Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University, that there were three waves of migration to the Americas across the land bridge of Beringia, which today lies beneath the waters of the Bering Strait. The first group to cross, some 11,000 years ago, were “pushed” southward by the second group to migrate, who were in their turn largely forced to the south by the final group to cross the land bridge—the Inuit, or Eskimos. The first group across Beringia settled South America and, aside from notable exceptions like the Incas, were mainly hunter-gatherers.
    According to Greenberg, evidence for this migration can be found in the relationships among the languages of the Americas, both living and extinct. He claims, for example, that the languages of Mexico southward, by and large, are more closely related linguistically than those of central and northern North America. In Greenberg’s view, Pirahã would have to be more closely related to other South American languages than to any language anywhere else. However, the Pirahã language is not demonstrably related to any living language. Greenberg’s claims that it is related to languages belonging to the family that he calls Macro-Chibcha are nearly impossible to evaluate, and the evidence that I have been able to uncover over the years suggests that Pirahã and the now extinct related dialect, Mura, form a single language isolate, unrelated to any other known language. However, it is impossible to prove that Pirahã was not related to any other Amazonian languages in the distant past. Historical linguistics methods, used for classifying and reconstructing the history of languages, simply do not allow us to look back far enough to say certainly that two languages never developed from a common source language.
    An alternative to Meggers’s and Greenberg’s views has been developed by Roosevelt and her colleagues, including my own former Ph.D. student Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida. According to Roosevelt, the Amazon was and is capable of sustaining large settlements and civilizations, including, if Roosevelt is correct, the Mara-joara civilization of the island of Marajó. According to Roosevelt,
Homo sapiens
has been in South America much longer than the Greenberg Meggers set of ideas would allow.
    The existence of language isolates like Pirahã and Mura (known by early explorers, when the Mura language was still spoken, simply as Mura-Pirahã, two very similar dialects of a single language) might be understood as supporting Roosevelt’s ideas, because large amounts of time are required to sufficiently “erase” the similarity between languages to produce a language isolate. On the other hand, if the Pirahãs had been separated from other languages and peoples very early on in the peopling of the Americas, this could explain their linguistic and cultural uniqueness by either the Meggers or Roosevelt theories. The likelihood is that we will never know where the Pirahãs or their language came from—not unless a cache of early documents is discovered that record extinct but related languages. In that case, we could use the standard methodology of comparative and historical linguistics to recreate something of the Pirahãs’ past.
    Some evidence already exists that the Pirahãs are not originally from the part of the jungle where they currently reside, from the lack of native vocabulary for some species of monkeys found around the Maici. The Brazilian monkey
paguacu
(a name from the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family) is referred to by the Pirahãs by the same name, for example. That makes
paguacu
a loan word, one borrowed from Portuguese or one of the two Tupi-Guarani groups, the Parintintin and the Tenharim, that the Pirahãs have had long contact with. Since there is no evidence that the Pirahãs have ever given up one of their own