Randy in his LJ (A Bit More Detail) pointed out the article in the SF Chronicle (sfgate) about some evidence that the Chumash of California may have had some tech transfer from the Polynesians. Namely their plank boats. The article rests on a linguistic oddity, tech similarity (maybe), and new radiocarbon dates for abalone shells. I'm not sure that I am convinced, but, truthfully, I'd like to think that the Chumash came up with their uber awesome boats on their own. But that's just me.
However, let me state that this is not the first paper in support of the idea that the Polynesians having contact with the new world. A few years ago, there was a dna study (that is now in contention) about PreColumbian South American chickens (in dispute, of course). Furthermore, it seems that sweet potatoes, a SoAm botanical resident, made their way into the diet of Polynesians as well (possibly rafted from SoAm, or so sayeth the critics).
All of this makes you wonder. Just how much contact did the New World have with the rest PreColumbian? We know about the Norse for sure. The Polynesians are looking promising at this point. Are there any other hard bits of data that lead to others?
However, let me state that this is not the first paper in support of the idea that the Polynesians having contact with the new world. A few years ago, there was a dna study (that is now in contention) about PreColumbian South American chickens (in dispute, of course). Furthermore, it seems that sweet potatoes, a SoAm botanical resident, made their way into the diet of Polynesians as well (possibly rafted from SoAm, or so sayeth the critics).
All of this makes you wonder. Just how much contact did the New World have with the rest PreColumbian? We know about the Norse for sure. The Polynesians are looking promising at this point. Are there any other hard bits of data that lead to others?
3 comments:
The Chumash thing falls into that intriguing zone between "crank" and "take seriously". It's /not/ cranky, and the research is solid. It's just that there's not... quite... enough there.
The sweet potato thing has been debated for almost a century now. You've read Kon-Tiki, right? It's a work of advocacy, not science, but it's also pure fun.
One interesting aspect of Polynesians that doesn't get discussed much is why they chose to /give up/ certain seemingly useful technologies. I mean, I can barely see giving up pigs. But who the hell gives up pottery? The early Polynesians, that's who. Go figure.
Doug M.
The linguistic correspondences are off, and this has been known for a while: http://faroutliers.blogspot.com/2005/02/how-not-to-do-comparative-linguistics.html
Pretty much what I came up with when I first heard about it too. Sloppy reconstruction, sloppy semantics.
(At its best, historical linguistics is the "hardest" social science, but its rigorous methodology has fallen on hard times: most of the obvious discoveries for speakers of European languages have already been discovered, and so the rigor isn't emphasized enough in the classroom.)
This hypothesis is a little insulting to the Chumash, who were inventive in other ways. Did you know they independently invented token money? round beads cut from shells that had little value outside of a monetary context -- unlike (say) cowries or wampum -- and they were regularly used in everyday economic transactions. (I wonder if Spanish records recorded any cases of usury.) And they kept inflation down by destroying hoards in funeral feasts.
Carlos
I dug up their 2005 paper. It's better than the newspaper account, but it's still flawed. They come up with a proto-Chumash form that has a convenient glottal stop at the end to match the Polynesian form, and then they have to adjust the sequence of the sound shift of the Polynesian intervocalic k to a glottal stop to make it match. WTF?
They're also aware that "tree trunk" and "sewn plank canoe" are rather semantically divergent, but that's okay, since "Polynesian lexical items tend to have very wide semantic ranges".
They make another claim, about the word for "sewn-plank canoe" in Gabrielino (a language related distantly to Nahuatl), and it's even weaker.
They do deal with the problem about "why didn't these people borrow the actual Polynesian word for 'canoe'?" They say the terminology might have been in flux, and that the Californians only borrowed the techniques of boat-building anyway.
It is weak sauce. not actively wrong, but it requires a lot more evidence in my book for it to be right.
Carlos
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