Researchers conducted an evolutionary analysis of North American and Central Siberian languages to uncover secrets of these people's migration.
The research indicates that a group of people moved from the Bering Land Bridge and migrated back to Asia or North America, a PLOS news release reported.
A possible language family called Dené-Yeniseian suggests there is are common characteristics between "North American Na-Dene languages and the Yeniseian languages of Central Siberia," the news release reported.
To test this theory the researchers used a technique called phylogenetic analysis; this process was originally used to study "evolutionary relationships between biological species," the news release reported.
"The authors first coded a linguistic dataset from the languages, modeled the relationship between the data, and then modeled it against migration patterns from Asia to North America, or out-of-Beringia," the news release reported.
The researchers found the Na-Dene language was spread across the North American coast by people who migrated through Siberia, and was later dispersed across the inner region.
"We used computational phylogenetic methods to impose constraints on possible family tree relationships modeling both an Out-of-Beringia hypothesis and an Out-of-Asia hypothesis and tested these against the linguistic data. We found substantial support for the out-of-Beringia dispersal adding to a growing body of evidence for an ancestral population in Beringia before the land bridge was inundated by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age."
The study does not definitively dispute the popular theory that hunters entered North America through Beringia, but it does suggest migration patterns were more complicated than we previously believed.
"This work also helps demonstrate the usefulness of evolutionary modeling with linguistic trees for investigating these types of questions," the news release reported.
The study, titled "Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia," was published in the journal Plos One.
