Make America Asian Again!!
MAAA!!!!
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Is this just confirmation of already established assumptions? Because I always thought that was the case.
This is old news.
I remember learning this when I was in high school, and I'm old.
Genetic proof came before the turn of the millennium, and similarities in languages and culture a couple of hundred years before that.
I'll try to summarise it but the text is long and messy, so watch out for potential inaccuracies from my part. TL;DR:
It starts off with a group from Siberia and another from East Asia merging into a new group. The new group then re-splits.
One side of the split stays in Siberia. The descendants of the other half then settle the Americas, in three separated waves, in 23~20kya:
- a "ghost" population, not directly attested.
- the "main" ancestors of the Native Americans (ANA)
- Ancient Beringians.
All three crossed the strait and arrived in the Americas, but separately, between 20kya and 23kya. The Mixe people have some partial heritage from the "ghost" population, but the past that the "ghost" population died off.
The Ancient Beringians didn't go too far, they only reached as far as Alaska. ~7kya or so they died off.
One of those populations also made its way into Japan, but the text doesn't specify which.
Around 21~16kya, ANA split, but the text doesn't mention how. Then around 15.7kya, it split again, into two new groups:
- Northern (I'll call them NNA) - ancestors of the Algonquian, Salishan, Tsimshian and Na-Dené. More on the Na-Dené later.
- Southern (SNA) - they spread like crazy, being the ancestors of most Amerindians except the above.
There was also some backmigration of NNA back into both northern China and Siberia. There's some linguistic evidence of that in the Dené-Yeniseian language family; if I got it right the Yeniseians are descendants of the backmigrants.
Further on the text details the further Amerindian genetic pool splits, but I didn't read it so far.
From a linguistic PoV this reinforces the Dené-Yeniseian language family hypothesis, but more importantly: it shows that Joseph Greenberg's proposal of an "Amerind language family" is likely true. Sadly our current methods are rather shitty to deal with such old stuff, even Proto-Afro-Asiatic is a bit of a stretch of the method.