Aleuts

The New World

During the last glacial maximum (formed between Asia and America),known as Beringia, also the Bering land bridge, it was first speculated that the ancestors of the Aleuts made their way by walking into the New World to settle in the circumpolar zone of the Aleutian Islands. Stronger support is forming for maritime entrance into the New World as more evidence surfaces, like the discovery of fossils of bears carbon-dated to more than 12,000 years ago and of a young man dating back more than 9,000 years ago, on Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska, which was thought to be glacially covered. Dr. Tim Heaton is doing the study of these fossils and the possibility of glacier-free areas, existing along what now are islands that border Alaska. This opens the possibility that Aleuts, as well as other Native Americans (either during or after other glaciating processes)could travel via waterway to the Americas.

Due to the location of the Aleuts and the various traits they exhibit, questions have developed as to what Native group the Aleuts originated from, either the Eskimos or the Tlingit. William S. Laughlin presented that the Aleuts came from the “proto-Eskimo-Aleut culture.” Linguists like Swadesh,Hirsch, and Bergsland suggest that the Aleuts separated from a proto-Eskimo-Aleut Language around 4,000 years ago. Mitochondria DNA research by Dennis O'Rourke and Geoff Hayes reveals that the Aleuts became their own people about 6,000 years ago.

Did the Aleuts come by land or sea? Was the split prior to or after the linguistic Eskimo language? Within these equations is an Aleut myth, mentioned in Baidarka as a Living Vessel: On the Mysteries of the Aleut Kayak Builders (1988), which backs a theory that the Aleuts migrated from the east (the mainland, after arriving either easterly by land or westerly by water). In this account, the Aleuts moved after their “creation,” from the overpopulated Chilkak (translation perhaps “Chilkat,” a Haines, Alaska, area) so they could have their own land.

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