Deloria also argued that science, when studying people, was not neutral. In his view, some scientific theories harbored social and political agendas that were used to deprive Indians and other minorities of their rights. Many of the assumptions that underlay certain scientific principles were based on obsolete religious or social views, and he urged science to shed these dubious relics. The issue for Deloria was not science vs. religion (or tradition), it was good science vs. bad science, and in his view, the Bering Strait Theory was bad science.
Nor was Deloria alone in this opinion. Since it was first proposed in the late 16th century, and especially in its most recent incarnations in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, the most vociferous critics of the Bering Strait Theory have been scientists. Even among archaeologists and physical anthropologists, generally the most dogmatic proponents of this theory, it has always been extremely factious. And the abuse they would heap upon each other was no less acidic than that they spewed on outsiders.
... Other than Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené, linguists have yet to find any connection with any language stocks of the Americas and those of Asia. Along with the tremendous hemispheric diversity, this created serious doubts about the dates proposed by archaeologists and physical anthropologists for Indian origins. At the beginning of the 20th century it was held to be at most 10,000 years and generally only 5,000 years. In 1916, Edward Sapir, among the most important and influential linguists in history, countered the prevailing archaeological view; “ten thousand years, however, seems a hopelessly inadequate span of time for the development from a homogeneous origin of such linguistic differentiation as is actually found in America.” Instead he argued that, “the best piece of evidence of great antiquity of man in America is linguistic diversification rather than archaeological.”
...Starting in 1987, the tensions between the proponents of the Bering Strait Theory and linguists turned into open warfare as archaeologists and geneticists used a highly disputed (and now completely discredited) theory by the linguist Joseph Greenberg to claim that the linguistic evidence now (after hundreds of years of refuting it) showed that Indians migrated from Asia to the New World around 15,000 years ago. The dispute led to a torrent of scientific papers by the world’s most prominent linguists denouncing the use of “non-science” and faulty data to back the Bering Strait Theory. The archaeologists and geneticists largely ignored the objections, forcing a group of linguists–led by Lyle Campbell, author of the standard work in that field, American Indian Languages: the Historical Linguistics of Native America, and Ives Goddard, curator at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution and the linguistic and technical editor of the massive Handbook of North American Indians–to write to the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2004 and condemn the widespread use of pseudo-scientific linguistic “evidence” in genetic studies about Indian origins.
The dispute also led the influential linguist, Johanna Nichols, to publish “Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the New World,” in the journal Language in 1990. In her introduction, she first made two important scientific points: the diversity of the languages of the New World is due to “the operation of regular principles of linguistic geography;” and that the linguistic and archaeological evidence from the Sahul clearly contradicted the attempts to assign early dates for the Bering Strait migration, since the assignment of early dates in the New World would create a scientific anomaly; “but such a discrepancy–one of at least an order of magnitude–must be assumed if we adhere to the Clovis [15,000 years ago] or received chronology [20,000 years ago] for the settlement of the New World.”
Nichols’ paper used six independent linguistic methods for calculating American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would have taken a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian languages to have evolved from one language, or 35,000 years if migrants had come in multiple waves. She concluded that, “The unmistakable testimony of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been inhabited nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea.”
The advocates of the Bering Strait Theory have countered that the linguistic evidence, strong as it may be, is not “proof” that Indians have inhabited the Americas for more than 15,000 years, and granted, it is not proof, it is evidence. The demand by the proponents of the Bering Strait Theory for “indisputable proof” is actually a curious but important aspect of that theory. Science is only rarely able to prove things with absolute certainty, and it normally confines itself to mathematical probability. As one scientist put it, “proof is not a currency of science,” and virtually all widely accepted scientific theories are based upon the preponderance of the evidence, not proof. This strident demand for “proof” while ignoring the evidence is abnormal in science and reflects the fact that originally the Bering Strait Theory was not a scientific theory at all, but a dogma. And this dogmatic stance, along with the vicious nature of the debate surrounding it, has long been a sore point for many scientists, not just for Indians.
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