The Great Divide

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).
     
    M OTHER T ONGUES , L UMPERS AND S PLITTERS
    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