Paper Topic:

Anthropology 130- Introduction to Physical Anthropology

p ANTHROPOLOGY 130

2007

For many decades , anthropologists decided - based on racial appearance and archaeological findings - that American Indians originated in Asia and are related to the peoples of Siberia and Mongolia

While this may be true of some First Peoples (Inuit languages and cultures in western Alaska are quite similar to those across the Bering Strait , it is becoming increasingly apparent that it is not true of all Indians , and that a re-evaluation - incorporating a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates the study and linguistics and genetics as well as anthropology

and archaeology - is in . This is the thesis of Herbert S . Klein and Daniel C . Schiffner in their article , The Current Debate About The Origins of Paleoindians of America

It has long been speculated that the early paleoindians arrived in a single wave of immigration about 12 ,000 years ago during a time that Alaska and Siberia were connected by a land bridge . The nature of stone spear points and other primitive tools found throughout the Americas seemed to reinforce this view . However by the mid 1980s , new findings and carbon-14 dating methods started to reveal a different picture pushing the date back even earlier

Work by two anthropologists , working with a linguist , later suggested that there were three major waves of immigration , based on the existence of three major linguistic groups - NaDene , which includes Athapaskan Tlingit and Haida as well as Navajo and isolated North Pacific coast tribes Aleut-Inuit (Eskimo and everything else (The latter category includes languages that are as diverse as Japanese and Basque ) Now studies of mitochondrial DNA is starting to challenge the three-wave model

These studies of Native American mtDNA - inherited only through the female line - now indicate that all American Indians belong to one or more of four haplogroups ' which are identified as A ,B ,C , and D . The earliest immigrants were those containing all but C , who appear to have originated in Central Asia and gone their separate way between 25 and 30 thousand years B .P . While there is some disagreement over how many waves of immigration there were , it appears that the NaDene group of Alaska and New Mexico is a relative newcomer , arriving perhaps only 7 ,000 years ago

To look at various Native Peoples from all parts of the new world , it would seem obvious that these are not descended from a single race of people . Except for the straight , black hair and dark eyes , Indians of North and South America are an incredibly diverse group , both linguistically and physically . Na-Dene peoples - particularly the Navajo - bear a much more striking resemblance to their Asiatic ancestors than to say , someone of Iroquois or Ojibwa ancestry (which was a distinct problem for Navajo code talkers ' serving in the U .S . armed forces in the Pacific during World War II ) European admixtures notwithstanding there appears to be a great deal of variation in skin tone as well . Most telling however is the linguistic evidence . Whereas nearly all European and Indo-Iranian languages...

21 pages

86.5 KB

Free sing-up