Who were the Native Americans? The Spanish, French,

and English explorers were perplexed by that question.

Their first assumption that the natives were Chinese was soon abandoned;

the natives obviously were not European and did not seem to be African

either. The explorers could not think of any other possibilities. William

Strachey spoke for them in 1612 in his Historie of Travell into Virginia

Britania: “It were not perhappes too curyous a thing to demaund, how

these people might come first, and from whome, and whence, having no

entercourse with Africa, Asia nor Europe, and considering the whole

world, so many years, by all knowledg receaved, was supposed to be only

conteyned and circumscrybed in the discovered and travelled Bowndes of

those three.”

The Indian societies he saw, Strachey would have been astonished to

learn, were formed by thousands of years of migration, splitting apart,

rejoining, exchanging mates, settling, and adapting—essentially the same

process that shaped European lives and culture. Just as Europeans were

products of the migrations of western Asians, so the Native Americans were

descendants of migrants from eastern Asia. And just as the Europeans' languages

give a view of their history, so American Indians' languages illustrate

their background.

The first Indians the Spaniards encountered in what they named La

Florida spoke dialects of a language known as

the spread of language indicates has now been confirmed by genetic studies.

Together they suggest that ancestors of the American Indians probably

began crossing to North America roughly 30,000 years ago. Climatologists

now believe that from about 60,000 years ago, Asia and North America

were joined at what is now the Bering Strait and archaeologists have found

evidence of human settlements in northeastern Siberia from about 40,000

years ago. So it was possible for humans and animals to walk across a land

bridge, which geologists call Beringia. They began to do so because,

although much of North America was covered by huge glaciers and sheets

of ice, parts of Alaska enjoyed a relatively mild climate. Even in the coldest

times, there was a corridor of relatively open countryside that channeled

movement of animals and men to the south. Then, about 10,000 years ago,

with the coming of what geologists term the Holocene, a warmer epoch, so

much ice melted that the sea rose as much as 120 meters and submerged

the land bridge. Those people who had already made the passage from

Asia profited from the melting of the vast sheets of ice to move inland and

further south. By about 14,000 years ago, some had reached Patagonia and

others had spread over both continents.

After their arrival in the New World, the speakers of Amerind spread

out across almost the whole of North and South America. Pockets of

other languages remained in the American Southwest and the Canadian

Northwest. These were derivatives of an Old World language now called

Na-Dene and were spoken in the far north of the continent where what is

known as Eskimo-Aleut was the common tongue. Then, for thousands of

years as families and small clans moved apart from one another, they

acquired different habits, adapted to different environments, and made

changes in the way they spoke.We can see how this process works by delving

back into the past of our own language. Shakespeare's English is intelligible

to us although it contains expressions we no longer understand.

Middle English, spoken a few centuries earlier, is arcane. Farther back

and farther away, English's close cousins—Spanish, Italian, French, and

Portuguese—although sharing some vocabulary and much syntax and

grammar, were already largely foreign. If we move yet farther afield to

languages in our same Indo-European family, Russian, Persian, Greek,

Armenian, and Sanskrit appear almost totally alien. So it was with the

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