Environmental productivity predicts migration, demographic, and linguistic patterns in prehistoric California.

ABSTRACT: Global patterns of ethnolinguistic diversity vary tremendously. Some regions show very little variation even across vast expanses, whereas others exhibit dense mosaics of different languages spoken alongside one another. Compared with the rest of Native North America, prehistoric California exemplified the latter. Decades of linguistic, genetic, and archaeological research have produced detailed accounts of the migrations that aggregated to build California's diverse ethnolinguistic mosaic, but there have been few have attempts to explain the process underpinning these migrations and why such a mosaic did not develop elsewhere. Here we show that environmental productivity predicts both the order of migration events and the population density recorded at contact. The earliest colonizers occ

SUBMITTER: Codding BF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3767520 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature