Early Human Migration Ideas Need Adjustment

I heard a lecture from a NYU linguistics professor about Taiwan, and about the Austronesian language family. The Austronesian family has great diversity, is on par with Indo-European and Bantu for age and primacy in its areas, and until the European Colonial period, covered the most area. Parts of south-east Asia, all native Pacific islands, and even Madagascar speak an Austronesian language.

If you can imagine the earliest branches of the tree of this language, the spot where they differ enough fundamentally as to account for a new branch, then you can begin to see: all but one of those branches exists on the island of Taiwan. There is only one branch that sailed to the Philipines, to Hawai'i, to Samoa, to Madascar. The most diversity at the base lives on a small island, and one spread.

This is the way linguistics have helped migratory scientists track human migrations throughout history: look where the most diversity exists, post that as the source, and see where one or a few of the languages spread from there.

When applying this method to the aboriginal Americans, what we see is the most diversity exists in northern California (not in Alaska, as our current understanding should show) and that there are maybe a handfull language families that moved out over the continent. California has more diversity in native peoples, cultures, and languages, than then rest of North America combined, which I thought was weird when I took a class on it.

There isn't much vocal scholarship about discussing the origins of the Mongoloid folks' migrations to the Americas. I've been telling people with whom I randomly get into conversations with about the incorrect Bering Straight theory, but I'm not a professional linguistics researcher (I have placed the idea in a novel I'm working on, though).

The time period of their migration and entrance to the continent would have to be moved back somewhat anyway, so until we can lurch the clock back with some kind of evidence, that conversation won't be started.

Guess what: discoveries in Tamil Nadu show that Acheulian stone tools were being used in India far earlier than thought. Late last week it was reported that magnetic tests show that the tools were made before the last magneitc pole reversal, so at least a million years prior. There were thousands of tools at this site in India. Whether they were made by Erectus, Heidelbergensis, or Sapien is the question...

Also, and even as startling: discoveries were made in Texas just as recently as India that show human habitation that predates the "first" Americans, the Clovis people, by as much as twenty-five hundred years.

Maybe this conversation will get started in my lifetime.