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- Title
Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia.
- Authors
Sicoli, Mark A.; Holton, Gary
- Abstract
Recent arguments connecting Na-Dene languages of North America with Yeniseian languages of Siberia have been used to assert proof for the origin of Native Americans in central or western Asia. We apply phylogenetic methods to test support for this hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis that Yeniseian represents a back-migration to Asia from a Beringian ancestral population. We coded a linguistic dataset of typological features and used neighbor-joining network algorithms and Bayesian model comparison based on Bayes factors to test the fit between the data and the linguistic phylogenies modeling two dispersal hypotheses. Our results support that a Dene-Yeniseian connection more likely represents radiation out of Beringia with back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America.
- Subjects
NORTH America; ASIA; LINGUISTICS research; PHYLOGENY; EMIGRATION &; immigration; NA-Dene languages; YENISEIAN languages; HYPOTHESIS; COMPARATIVE linguistics
- Publication
PLoS ONE, 2014, Vol 9, Issue 3, p1
- ISSN
1932-6203
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0091722