Is there any cultural or linguistic similarity between people native to Eastern Siberia and Northwestern America?

by captainloudmouth
The_Alaskan

Yes.

Thanks to the work of the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks (and specifically Edward Vajda of Western Washington University), we have a very good grasp of linguistic links between Siberian and Alaskan languages. The Dene-Yeniseian Hypothesis proposes a genetic relationship between the Na-Dene languages of North America and the Yeniseian languages of Siberia.

This is big stuff if you're studying the human flow across Beringia. We have archaeological and genetic evidence for the settlement of North America, and the linguistic link is something else we can point at to say that yes, North America was settled across Beringia and not some other route.

The Dene-Yniseian Hypothesis is largely based on the Ket language, spoken by a handful of hunters along the Yenisei River. Thanks to their isolation, their language has been preserved despite the ebb and flow of pastoral, horse-riding civilizations in central and northern Asia. That makes a place like Kellog, population 342, the perfect place to study.

retarredroof

From an archaeological perspective, you will find it difficult to identify cultural assemblages in Eastern Siberia that appear antecedent or closely related to assemblages in North America. Late pleistocene sites are generally small with limited distinct tool types. They are extremely rare. There are some tantalizing Siberian sites that have been investigated. The Yana RHS site ca. 27,000 BP and Dyuktai Cave (33,000-10,000 BP) are often cited as sites possibly related to early Americans. The Center for the Study of First Americans is a good resource on these. The "relatedness" is generally inferred by noting artifact types (primarily bifaces, blades, and burins) found at early sites on both continents. Also, Maureen King has reported on a Clovis point from Siberia here but there a number of problems with this find, like the date is all wrong at 8,300 BP.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR

It's not exactly Northwestern, but a genome from a member of the ancient Saqqaq culture, one of the first groups of people in Greenland, was recently sequenced. It has much more similarity to the Chukchi and Koryak peoples of Eastern Siberia, and to a lesser degree the Samoyedic peoples of Northern Siberia, than it does to modern day Inuit, Yup'ik, or Aleut people, let alone other indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Toggling harpoons, a critical piece of technology for arctic marine mammal hunting, may also have been spread from one side of the Bering Strait to the other.