Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (8272)	3/13/2001 2:21:04 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Native American Population and languages Estimates of the aboriginal population are based on information supplied by explorers, traders, missionaries, and other early reporters and are only as good as the reporters' observations were trustworthy. A more serious impediment to an accurate count is that some tribes, by the time they were visited, had already been depopulated by European diseases and weapons. The American anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber submitted a population total for the area north of Mexico at about 1,150,000. He subgrouped the populations to accord with subsistence areas rather than geographical boundaries. In addition, he ranked the areas according to population densities, expressed in numbers of persons per square kilometre: California area, 43.40; northwest Pacific Coast, 28.30; southwestern United States, 10.70; Columbia-Fraser rivers area, 7.15; eastern area, 6.95; Arctic coast, 4.02; Great Basin, 2.47; and northern area, 1.35. Although agricultural areas of the east and southwest contained the greater population (about 405,000 in all), Kroeber believed that the predominantly fishing economy of the Pacific Coast (Bering Strait to southern California) had greater relative density of population. His estimates were Pacific Coast, 25.2 persons per square kilometre; agricultural areas, 10.1; remaining area north of Mexico, 2.2. The population of a little over 1,000,000 for North America north of Mexico contrasts with the estimated 5,000,000 for Mexico and Central America and with the estimated 25,000,000 for the Western Hemisphere as a whole. (These uncertifiable estimates must, however, be approached with caution.) The outstanding characteristic of American Indian languages is their diversity. There were more than 60 language families in North America, comprising over 500 languages, but these have been reduced to a smaller number of superstocks by modern linguists. The American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir, for instance, proposed six linguistic groups for North America (including the Arctic): Eskimo-Aleut, Algonquian-Wakashan, Na-Dené, Penutian, Hokan-Siouan, and Aztec-Tanoan (see North American Indian languages). No American language has any genetic relationship to any language group in the Old World that has yet been fully demonstrated. It may be concluded from this that the ancestors of the Indians left the Old World so long ago that any relationship was lost through linguistic change. britannica.com I thought the disease was spread almost from the beginning, from tribe to tribe. We had nothing much to do with it......