The Great Divide Read online

  The Bluefish Caves sites, about forty miles south-west of Old Crow, provided butchered animals, dated by associated pollen to between 15,550 and 12,950 years ago, together with stone tools at much the same date – stone tools moreover that, as Fagan says, would not be out of place in Dyukhtai.15 Later, similar finds were made at Trail Creek, Tangle Lakes, Donnelly Ridge, Fairbanks, Onion Portage and Denali, with most dates in the 11,000 to 8,000 years ago range. At first, this tradition was known either as the Dyukhtai or Denali or Nenana complex, but Palaeo-Arctic is now the preferred term for these and slightly later artefacts. The diminutive size of the stone work is its most striking feature, and may stem from the fact that pollen analysis in the area shows that there was a rapid vegetational change beginning about 14,000 years ago, when the herbaceous tundra (grasses, mosses) gave way to a shrub tundra (woody thickets), which would have caused the mammal population to dwindle and may well have forced early man out of Beringia. As he moved on, smaller tools would have been preferable.

  Not all the sites in eastern Beringia contained microblades. Others contain large core and flake tools, including simple projectile points and large blades. And at Anangula, on the coast out along the Aleutian island chain, blade tools were made, but not the diminutive microblades as at Denali. So there was quite a bit of cultural diversity in Beringia around 11,000 years ago. We simply to not know if this represents distinct cultural traditions that existed side-by-side, or alternative adaptation strategies designed to cope with different forms of wildlife.

  The evidence, such as it is, suggests that there was no ‘crossing’ of the Bering Strait, in any modern sense. The early peoples spread into eastern Siberia, which then extended as far east as what is now the Yukon and Alaska. Then, when the seas rose, after ~14,000 years ago, the peoples of eastern Beringia were forced even further east, where the huge glaciers were themselves melting, allowing passage south, as we shall see. The seas rose behind them and they were isolated in the New World.

  An alternative view, supported by some of the genetic evidence already reported, is that early man penetrated the New World along the coast. This makes sense, not only in view of the genetics, but – it will be recalled – because early mankind, after he and she left Africa, is considered to have followed a ‘beachcombing’ route (though as we have seen there is as yet no direct evidence for this). It also finds support in the discovery that, at Monte Verde, an early site in southern Chile, the remains of several kinds of seaweed were found in ancient hearths, while other remains appear to represent ancient clumps of kelp which had been chewed into ‘cuds’, according to Tom Dillehay, one of the archaeologists involved in the excavation.16 Several other scientists have pointed out that there are virtually uninterrupted beds of seaweed right around the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean and have proposed that, with seaweed being so useful as a source of nutrition and for its medicinal properties, it would make sense for early coastal peoples to have followed this distribution (see map 5).

  MOTHER TONGUES, LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS

  In the genetic study considered earlier, carried out by Sijia Wang and his team, it was observed that there was an overlap between genetics and linguistic similarity. A second study, by Nelson Fagundes and colleagues, also showed a strong link between genetics and language among the Tupian-speakers of Brazil. Such results have to be understood against the background of the well-documented consensus which now accepts that some languages have evolved from others. This was formally first set out in the late-eighteenth century by a British civil servant and judge in Colonial India, William Jones, who observed the similarities between Sanskrit and several modern European languages.* And we know, for example, that Spanish and French are derived from Latin, which itself developed out of proto-Italic.17 In fact, all but a handful of European languages have evolved from a proto-Indo-European root, meaning that thousands of years ago, many of the languages from the Atlantic to the Himalayas had a common source. A very similar exercise has been carried out with the languages of North America. Some of the scenarios constructed by linguists fit neatly with what we may call the LGM consensus. For example, Robert Dixon, an Australian linguist, has calculated that a dozen separate groups speaking different languages entered the Americas between about 20,000 and 12,000 years ago. Daniel Nettle, an English linguist, on the other hand, argues that the diversity of languages spoken in the New World today began in the last 12,000 years – i.e., after they arrived in America.

  It is fair to say that linguistic research is on less secure grounds than the genetic or archaeological evidence, for the very good reason that we have no real way of knowing what languages people spoke in the past, especially before the invention of writing. The only evidence we have for non-literate societies are the languages spoken today, their geographical spread across the world, and some idea of how, and at what rate, languages change or evolve. This is better than nothing but it still means that our reconstructions of past languages are at best theoretical and at worst speculative. This is why the field of ‘chronolinguistics’, or ‘glottochronology’, has been so controversial. In all that follows, it is as well to keep the above observations in mind.

  In principle, the operation of comparative linguistics is simple. For example, the word for ‘two’ in Sanskrit is duvá, in classical Greek it is duo, in Old Irish it is dó, and in Latin it is duo. Thousands of similar examples could be given, to underline the point that specific languages are related. The controversy arises over just how similar languages have to be in order for them to be regarded as stemming from a common origin. This is a field divided – notoriously – into ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, where the former favour a relatively small number of language families spread across the world, and the latter play down these linkages. If we note here, prominently, that the splitters are every bit as eminent as the lumpers, and that the splitters’ central message is that very few conclusions may be drawn about the spread of languages around the world, and that this should be borne in mind in what follows, we may then proceed to examine what the lumpers say. (It is also worth reminding ourselves that, in the genetic studies reported above, overlaps were found between genetics and language, suggesting that the lumpers have at least a case.)

  Map 6 shows the major language families of the world, according to Joseph Greenberg, an American linguist and one of the major (and most controversial) ‘lumpers’. This reveals that there are three major language families in the New World – Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene and Amerind. On the face of it, this would suggest three waves of migration. Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist/anthropologist from Stanford University (and also a director of the Santa Fe Institute), in a re-analysis of Greenberg’s material, suggests that Amerind is a form of the Eurasiatic family, but whereas Eskimo-Aleut is a branch of the Eurasiatic family, ‘Amerind is related to Eurasiatic as a whole’, and is no closer to Eskimo-Aleut than is any other Eurasiatic language. Many features of Amerind (for example, kinship terms) are unique to the Americas and several features are common to North, Central and South America, suggesting to Ruhlen that this language expanded rapidly across the New World at a time when it was unoccupied by humans speaking any other languages.

  The second group, Na-Dene, is evidence for a second migration, later than that of the proto-Amerind speakers, Na-Dene being related to the Dene-Caucasian family whose homeland would appear to be in South East/Central Asia and includes Sino-Tibetan (again, see map 6). It also overlaps with the genetic marker known as M130, which originated in northern China and is not found in South America (see above).18

  Finally, Eskimo-Aleut is a third language family, a branch of Eur-asiatic, which would make it evidence for the most recent migration. This theory is supported further by the thin spread of this language family around the edges of northern Canada.

  So far then, the linguistic evidence is broadly in agreement with the genetic evidence, that the main migration into the New World took place between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, by a group of people speaking
Amerind, a branch of Eurasiatic, and that there was a second migration, much later, around 8,000 years ago, by a group of people speaking a language, Na-Dene, a form of Dene-Caucasian that originated in South East/Central Asia. The linguistic evidence also suggests there was a third migration – even more recent – of the people who speak Eskimo-Aleut, around the northern rim of Canada. This need not concern us too much as the Eskimo-Aleut people will play only a small role in our story.19

  So far, so good then. However, just as there are a small number of genetic studies that show an earlier entry into the New World, earlier than the 20,000–12,000 period (the LGM consensus), so there is one linguistic analysis that shows much the same. Johanna Nichols, at the University of California, at Berkeley, has estimated that there are in the world 167 language ‘stocks’ (groups of languages that can be related back to a common branching point). She does this on the basis of such features as word order (subject-object-verb, or subject-verb-object), the form of the personal pronouns, whether verbs are more ‘inflected’ than nouns (whether they change their endings according to sense and context), how number is treated, how singularity and plurality are represented in verbs, and so on.20 Using this approach, she looked at 174 languages spread around the world, and from this interrelationship she was able to conclude three things that interest us.

  One, there are only four large linguistic areas across the globe: the Old World, Australia, New Guinea (with Melanesia), and the New World. Two, in a region such as a continent or subcontinent which is isolated from outside influence (such as South America or Australia), the number of language stocks increases as a simple function of time.21

  But it is Nichols’ third conclusion that is the most interesting. In her own words: ‘A historical interpretation [of language diversity] would posit an ancient split between the linguistic populations of the Old World and the Pacific, with the Pacific then functioning as a secondary centre of spread and source of circum-Pacific colonisation. It is circum-Pacific colonisation rather than spread from the Old World that has populated most of the world, given rise to most of the genetic lineages of human language, and colonised the New World. The entry point to the New World was of course Beringia; but linguistic typology shows that the colonisers entering through Beringia were predominantly coastal people involved in the circum-Pacific colonisation pattern rather than inland Siberian people impelled ultimately by spreads out of central Eurasia.’ (Italics added.) A final gloss on this picture is that ‘the first colonisation of the New World was under way by about 35,000 years ago’.22

  On the face of it, of course, this appears to throw much that we have been discussing so far into disarray. The LGM consensus, the genetic evidence, Christy Turner’s dental evidence, together with the archaeological evidence from either side of the Bering Strait, and the linguistic evidence of Greenberg and Ruhlen, cohere in showing that early humankind reached the Bering Land Bridge roughly 16,500–15,000 years ago, via an inland route through central and northern Eurasia, with a second later group crossing the strait at about 8,000 years ago, originating in South East Asia. Johanna Nichols’ linguistic evidence says early peoples reached Beringia 35,000 years ago via the west coast of the Pacific rim, travelling north from island South East Asia, China and into Siberia. Can these two scenarios be reconciled?

  Nichols’ linguistic evidence is not like the genetic evidence for early entry into the Americas. As was referred to earlier, we may allow that one or two more or less genetically distinct but isolated groups of people entered America much earlier than the main group of migrants without seriously jeopardising the main thrust of the overall picture. But Nichols’ linguistic evidence by definition applies to large groups of people, not isolated pockets.

  The answer to the discrepancy must surely lie in the uncertain nature of the methodology of chronolinguistics. Many of Nichols’ colleagues, while accepting her division of languages into four ‘families’, do not take seriously her arguments about time depth; and she does not herself use glottochronology. We shall see in chapter four that, archaeologically speaking, there is next to no evidence for the presence of early peoples in the Americas beyond Alaska before 14,500 years ago but we shall also see, in chapter two, that there is good geological, cosmological and mythological evidence for why there would have been a second wave of migrants who entered the New World much later than the first, at around 8,000 years ago, after leaving island South East Asia and travelling around the Pacific rim. In other words Johanna Nichols is right about the origin of at least some of the New World languages, but wrong about the time depth. (Remember that it is the calculation of time depth that is so controversial and unreliable in comparative linguistics.) The clue to the disparity, as we shall also see, lies precisely in Nichols’ insistence that there was an ancient split between Old World and Pacific languages. Why should that be? What happened, deep in the past, to cause this split?

  The next chapter will go a long way to explaining that split and we shall also see that, on their way to the New World, some of the people who populated the Americas underwent a series of unique events that produced in them some psychological or experiential characteristics that distinguished them from those they left behind in Eurasia and which could have affected their later development. We shall see that some of these special events did in fact take place about 8,000 years ago, which agrees well with the genetic evidence, referred to earlier, concerning haplogroup M130, which is associated with the Na-Dene speakers who entered the New World at precisely that time.

  At one stage, it would have been difficult if not impossible to assemble such an argument about deep history, but not any more. In addition to advances in genetics and linguistics, we can say that, thanks to developments in geology and cosmology, we now know far more about our remote history than ever before and, moreover, these studies have shown surprising and consistent links with mythology.

  As a result, we now know that myths are less the fanciful, woolly accounts they have traditionally been dismissed as, and much more closely based on fact than anyone had previously imagined. Once we learn to decipher them – as is now happening – they tell us quite a bit about deep time.

  • 2 •

  FROM AFRICA TO ALASKA: THE DISASTERS OF DEEP TIME AS REVEALED BY MYTHS, RELIGION AND THE ROCKS

  The evidence of the previous chapter told us that early peoples, like the Chukchi, finally reached the Bering Strait from Africa, which their ancestors had left tens of thousands of years before, by one or both of two great routes, the Central Asian route or the Pacific rim route. In this chapter, instead of genetics, we shall be looking at myths and using a relatively new scientific synthesis which seeks to put the latest findings of cosmology, geology, palaeontology and archaeology together with mythology, to reconstruct distant occurrences in deep time, occurrences that were so catastrophic, traumatic and bewildering that ancient people brought all their intellectual firepower to bear on them, to make sense of their disastrous experiences. In the main, we now know, this is what myths, most of them, are – memories and, at the same time, warnings that disasters could well recur. By the time we are done, we shall have some idea of the early psychological differences between early Old World peoples and the first Americans.

  It has been known for more than a century that the most widespread myth across the world – as well as the best known – is that referring to a vast flood, whose exact size was not calibrated, but which was reported not just in the Christian bible, of course, but in the ancient legends of India, China, South East Asia, north Australia, and the Americas. We shall be considering the flood myth(s) in some detail in just a moment but for reasons that will become clear, it suits us here to consider first the second-most common myth on earth, that of the ‘watery creation’ of the world.

  The chief theme of this myth is the separation, usually of the sky from the Earth. This story is found in a band stretching from New Zealand to Greece (a significant distribution, as we shall see) and it invariably has a small
number of common features. The first is the appearance of light. As it says in Genesis, 1:3: ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Nearly all cosmogonies have this theme, where it is notable that neither the sun nor the moon is the source of the first light at Creation. Rather, the first light is associated with the separation of heaven and Earth. Only after heaven and Earth have separated does the sun appear. In some traditions in the east the light is let in because the heavy substance of the clouds that envelop the Earth sinks down to the ground, and the light, clearing the clouds, rises to become heaven. A common metaphor for this is an egg splitting. In other myths, the darkness is described as a ‘thick night’.

  Recent geological studies have identified a phenomenon known to scientists as the Toba Volcanic explosion. Cores drilled in the Arabian seabed have shown that there was a volcanic eruption at Toba in Sumatra between 74,000 and 71,000 years ago. This is known to have been the biggest eruption on earth during the last two million years, a massive conflagration that would have released a vast plume of ash thirty kilometres high (an estimated 670 cubic miles, twice the volume of Mount Everest), spreading north and west, to cover Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and large areas of the gulf region with a blanket six inches deep though at one site in central India the ash layer is still twenty feet thick.1 Toba ash has recently been found in the Arabian Sea and in the South China Sea, 2,400 kilometres from Toba itself.2 The eruption left an immense caldera that now holds Indonesia’s largest lake, Lake Toba, 85 kilometres long, up to 25 kilometres wide, with cliffs 1,200 metres high and water 580 metres deep.3 A prolonged volcanic winter would have followed this eruption. (Sea temperatures, according to geologist Michael Rampino, dropped by ten degrees Fahrenheit and a total darkness would have existed over large areas for weeks or months.)4 The aerosol clouds of minute globules of sulphuric acid, now known to be produced by massive eruptions, could have reduced photosynthesis by 90 per cent, or even shut it down completely, having a major effect on forest cover.5