Radio Script
1998

__________________

Speaking of Languages
__________________

STORY: Scientists have long used a technique called radiocarbon dating to determine the age of pottery, fire pits, clothing and other artifacts. Carbon dating is helping anthropologists pinpoint when the very first humans arrived in North America. But the technique may not tell the whole story.

University of Alaska Fairbanks linguist Steven Jacobson says studying the complexity and variety of Native American languages also can yield clues to when the first people journeyed to the Americas.

JACOBSON: "In Europe there are dozens of languages. There are not only the big ones like English, French, German and Russian. But there's also Dutch and Yiddish and Polish and Chech. But if you look at the Americas, there's English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Just four languages. That's because the time-depth is much less of white inhabitation in the Americas than in Europe. So in general the more the languages, the longer that people have probably lived there."

But there are some 140 Native American languages in use today. For so many distinct languages to have developed, linguists say that people had to have lived in the Americas for thousands of years. Johanna Nichols is a linguist at the University of California-Berkeley.

NICHOLS: "I've come up with a figure that it would take something like 30,000 years to create that population of language families. That's with continuous immigration. If there was a break in immigration, which there was during the height of glaciation, then it would have taken even longer. So I think I can confidently say the linguistic population of the New World is 40,000 years old."

Not surprisingly, Nichols' claim is highly controversial. Anthropologists generally accept 12,500 years ago as the earliest human presence in the Americas. The oldest known human settlement is in South America, at Monte Verde, Chile.

But, Nichols says, even the Native languages spoken around Monte Verde hint at much earlier origins. She says it would have taken about 7,000 years for the languages spoken there to evolve.

NICHOLS: "So that points to an entry of approximately 19,500 years ago minimum. The period of glacial maximum was going on right then and it would have been impossible to enter about 20,000 years ago, so this speaks to a much earlier entry."

And, Nichols says, there's more. Her analysis of Native American speech patterns indicates that a second wave of immigration probably occurred around 12,000 to 18,000 years ago. If true, people have been in the Americas far longer than scientists ever imagined possible.

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Doug Schneider in Fairbanks, Alaska.