Periodically, the settlement of the Americas comes into the news again (see ArchaeoBlog entries for 2007, for example — does that make it now longer NEWs?). And yet, it seems to come to basically the same thing I read back in 1986 in this article by Greenberg and others: genetic and linguistic evidence points to three main pulses of settlement — the earliest and largest being the Amerind, with Na-Dene and Eskimo/Aleut following. (Which, of course, differs from traditional First Peoples’ accounts, such as that of Raven finding people in a clamshell on the beach, as seen on the lower left of the Canadian $20 bill, below):
(The image is based on this exceptional piece of art)
