Alexander:
>>1. What about Amerinds (all native Americans but Na-Dene Indians >> and
>>Eskimo-Aleuts)?
John:
>I generally follow Greenberg and Cavalli-Sforza in this regard with
>three North American waves
As do I. This makes sense linguistically too regardless of Greenberg's
shortcomings. The EskimoAleut are the obvious newbies having connections to
ChuckchiKamchatkan and Uralic-Yukaghir. The Na-Dene seem to be connected to
the SinoTibetan and the NWC especially. This leaves "the rest" (called
Amerind) which do share peculiar consistencies in their pronominal sets from
North to South America, implying that they are all related from a common
source in the end.
>3. 5,000-3,000 BCE crossing of Innuit people, from Bering strait
>islands, creating the Thule culture up along the Alaskan Northern >Coast
>and East to Greenland.
Ooooh! THAT'S when they arrived! Beautiful, that works perfectly. Since the
language must originate from Steppe (c.9,000 BCE), it would have to have
been later than this. 5,000-3,000 BCE allows for seperation from a northerly
"Boreal" subbranch (Uralic-Yukaghir, ChuckK) sometime and somewhere in
between ProtoSteppe and the crossing, circa 7,000 BCE or so.
- gLeN
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