Re: this is so fascinating
Originally posted by miss khan
That obviously implies that the Hopi & Tibetans ARE somehow closely related, but how is this possible? Aren't they two different races of human beings, entirely and on very different ends of the earth? Does anybody know anything about the history of human migrations... that might explain the connection. The Native Americans did after all, cross into the New World thru the Bering Strait that was connected to what is now Russia, which is near Tibet. But why only the Hopi & the Tibet then? Why not all Native Americans & Tibet?
You're pretty close. The indigenous peoples of the New World are in fact of Mongoloid stock, meaning close relatives of the East Asians. They branched off quite a while ago, before their cousins who stayed home developed the epicanthic eye folds that to us define "Oriental," but DNA says they're the same gene pool.
The first wave of immigrants, the Athabascans, migrated across the Bering Land Bridge (it was the Ice Age then so sea level was much lower) around 14000 BCE. Some think they sailed over in boats, hugging the coastline, a few thousand years earlier but it doesn't change the results any. Their point of origin has been zoomed down to a fairly small area in what is now Mongolia. They populated the entire hemisphere. The Incas, Mayas, Aztecs, Mohawks, Sioux, most of the people in the New World are of Athabascan descent.
Then around 4000 BCE the second wave came -- same gene pool, and actually a fairly close starting point in Mongolia. They're called the Na-Dene. They found the hemisphere fairly well populated and couldn't make much headway. They displaced the people who were living west of the Rockies (which by the way means that the Indians who now live in Washington State cannot possibly be the descendants of "Kennewick Man," if you've been following that controversy) and became the Chumash and Tlingit and most of the tribes of the western US and Canada.
The last wave, the Eskimo-Aleut, arrived around 2000 BCE. Fortunately for them they were not from nice warm Mongolia, they were used to living in the Arctic Zone, because that's the only place that was left for them to settle. Their roots to their cousins in northern Siberia are still very obvious, in language and customs. They are an indigenous people who has come very close to circling the globe, although admittedly at a latitude where that's a pretty small circle. The Asian branch runs practically up to the eastern border of Finland, and the American branch has settled Greenland. Nothing separating them except the Scandinavian countries!
So this explains how the Tibetans, who are closely related to the Chinese, can have a common mythology with the Indians. (If you didn't buy my previous post.)
But actually it gets better.
Recent research suggests that there are not a whole bunch of language families. We've seen the number of families shrink over the past hundred years, as they found relationships such as the one that unites Mongolian, Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish into one family. But now, using massively parallel computer processing to analyze linguistic patterns that could never be done manually, they're finding amazing and very widespread similarities between languages, when you adjust for sound shifts that a thousand computers can track. They've already joined the Indo-European family to the one I described above and call it the Eurasiatic family.
But it keeps getting better. They're tracing words from Sino-Tibetan, Semitic, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, and other families all back to a common source. It looks very much like language sprang up in Africa when we were all still living there, and
all human languages are descended from a single ancestor.
When you think about it, it makes sense. What gave humans the ability to suddenly become so successful that they virtually exploded out of Africa into every climate zone and every ecosystem? Perhaps the ability to communicate!
So the answer to your question could be both more complicated and more simple than you expected. It's looking like all of our migration paths can be tracked back in tribal groups to our African ancestors, who were already talking. Language was only invented once, not multiple times. All human languages are related.
I'm jumping the gun, they've really only got it narrowed down to two families as of right now. But geeze, that's an amazing leap from the dozens of families that we used to believe in.
We really are all brothers and sisters. It's a shame we can't act like it!
To clear up a couple of nits:
Someone asked why the Navajo and the Hopi don't seem to be closely related. The reason is that they aren't. Migrations in the New World led people on long Treks. One of those tribes is a member of the Na-Dene people, and the other is Athabascan. Their ancestors arrived ten thousand years apart, so their cultures are much different. I can't for the life of me remember which is which. I know that the Utes are related to the Aztecs and are therefore Athabascans living in Na-Dene territory, but I don't know whether it's the Navajos and Hopis that are in the "wrong place."
And the concept of "red faces" came up. We've all been brainwashed into such a state of political correctness that we've forgotten that the early Americans called the Indians "red." It's OK, because many of them call themselves that. (Just like it's really OK to call them Indians. I've never met one who didn't sneer at the term "native American," because, as they point out, I'm a native American because I was born in Chicago but I sure as hell ain't no Indian!) In one of their legends, they identify four races of people: red, yellow, brown, and white. This legend goes back at least two thousand years, long before Columbus or Leif Erikson came over with their white skins. So who are they talking about? Could this be a really ancient legend they brought over from Asia sixteen thousand years ago???