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Science 27 February 1998:
Vol. 279. no. 5355, pp. 1306 - 1307
DOI: 10.1126/science.279.5355.1306b
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AAAS MEETING:
Mother Tongues Trace Steps of Earliest Americans

Ann Gibbons

While archaeologists are still trying to determine when the ancestors of the first inhabitants of South America first set foot in North America, a linguist has estimated from known rates of the spread of languages and people that it would have taken about 7000 years for a population to travel from Alaska to Chile. Because that would put the first Americans' arrival squarely in the middle of the last major glacial advance, she proposes that the first settlers began to enter the New World well before the height of glaciation--earlier than 22,000 years ago.

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Linguistic diversity of the Americas can be reconciled with a recent colonization.
D. Nettle (1999)
PNAS 96, 3325-3329
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)