The Great Divide by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online Page A

added.) A final gloss on this picture
     is that ‘the first colonisation of the New World was under way by about 35,000
     years ago’. 22
    On the face of it, of course, this appears to throw much that we have been
     discussing so far into disarray. The LGM consensus, the genetic
     evidence, Christy Turner’s dental evidence, together with the archaeological
     evidence from either side of the Bering Strait, and the linguistic evidence of Greenberg
     and Ruhlen, cohere in showing that early humankind reached the Bering Land Bridge
     roughly 16,500–15,000 years ago, via an inland route through central and northern
     Eurasia, with a second later group crossing the strait at about 8,000 years ago,
     originating in South East Asia. Johanna Nichols’ linguistic evidence says early
     peoples reached Beringia 35,000 years ago via the west coast of the Pacific rim,
     travelling north from island South East Asia, China and into Siberia. Can these two
     scenarios be reconciled?
    Nichols’ linguistic evidence is not like the genetic evidence for
     early entry into the Americas. As was referred to earlier, we may allow that one or two
     more or less genetically distinct but isolated groups of people entered America much
     earlier than the main group of migrants without seriously jeopardising the main thrust
     of the overall picture. But Nichols’ linguistic evidence by definition applies to
     large groups of people, not isolated pockets.
    The answer to the discrepancy must surely lie in the uncertain nature of the
     methodology of chronolinguistics. Many of Nichols’ colleagues, while accepting
     her division of languages into four ‘families’, do not take seriously her
     arguments about time depth; and she does not herself use glottochronology. We shall see
     in chapter four that, archaeologically speaking, there is next to no evidence for the
     presence of early peoples in the Americas beyond Alaska before 14,500 years ago but we
     shall also see, in chapter two, that there is good geological, cosmological and
     mythological evidence for why there would have been a second wave of
     migrants who entered the New World much later than the first, at around 8,000 years ago,
     after leaving island South East Asia and travelling around the Pacific rim. In other
     words Johanna Nichols is right about the origin of at least some of the New World
     languages, but wrong about the time depth. (Remember that it is the calculation of time
     depth that is so controversial and unreliable in comparative linguistics.) The clue to
     the disparity, as we shall also see, lies precisely in Nichols’ insistence that
     there was an ancient split between Old World and Pacific languages. Why should that be?
     What happened, deep in the past, to cause this split?
    The next chapter will go a long way to explaining that split and we shall
     also see that, on their way to the New World, some of the people who populated the
     Americas underwent a series of unique events that produced in them some psychological or experiential characteristics that distinguished them
     from those they left behind in Eurasia and which could have affected their later
     development. We shall see that some of these special events did in fact take place about
     8,000 years ago, which agrees well with the genetic evidence, referred to earlier,
     concerning haplogroup M130, which is associated with the Na-Dene speakers who entered
     the New World at precisely that time.
    At one stage, it would have been difficult if not impossible to assemble
     such an argument about deep history, but not any more. In addition to advances in
     genetics and linguistics, we can say that, thanks to developments in geology and
     cosmology, we now know far more about our remote history than ever before and, moreover,
     these studies have shown surprising and consistent links with mythology.
    As a result, we now know that myths are less the fanciful, woolly accounts
     they have traditionally been