Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia

Abstract

Recent arguments connecting Na-Dene languages of North America with Yeniseian languages of Siberia have been used to assert proof for the origin of Native Americans in central or western Asia. We apply phylogenetic methods to test support for this hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis that Yeniseian represents a back-migration to Asia from a Beringian ancestral population. We coded a linguistic dataset of typological features and used neighbor-joining network algorithms and Bayesian model comparison based on Bayes factors to test the fit between the data and the linguistic phylogenies modeling two dispersal hypotheses. Our results support that a Dene-Yeniseian connection more likely represents radiation out of Beringia with back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America.

Beringia and the global dispersal of modern humans

“…25 A recent analysis of the Na-Den e and Yeniseian languages indicates a backmigration from Beringia into Siberia and central Asia rather than the reverse. 102 These events may not have any archeological correlates, underscoring the earlier observation that migrations take many forms. The later movements into and out of Beringia may represent phenomena of a very different order from the earlier movements of people into and out of Beringia.…”

“…Two mtDNA subclades in Northeast Asia that appear to have originated in Beringia are C1a and A2a; the movement of the latter into western and southern Siberia is thought to have taken place a few thousand years ago . A recent analysis of the Na‐Dené and Yeniseian languages indicates a back‐migration from Beringia into Siberia and central Asia rather than the reverse . These events may not have any archeological correlates, underscoring the earlier observation that migrations take many forms.…”

Is theory about peopling of the Americas a bridge too far?

“…Researchers examined languages from Siberia, Alaska, and northern North America, looking for structural traits, such as the presence of plural pronouns. Using these traits to build an evolutionary-tree-like diagram, they found that the Siberian languages evolved alongside the Native American languages (11). This finding supports "at least a period of occupation and diversification within the Beringian area, and probably somewhere within the southwestern Alaskan area," says study coauthor Gary Holton of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.…”

Kalunga in the lusophone context: A phylogenetic study

“…In linguistics, the number of studies using computational phylogeny has recently increased (e.g. Gray & Atkinson 2003;Nakhleh et al 2005;Gray et al 2009;Prokić and Nerbonne 2008;Sicoli and Holton 2014;Bakker et al 2011;. Computational phylogenetic techniques have been used mainly for evolutionary studies of language families, and dialect and language classification in historical linguistics.…”