This Phys.org article describes an important fossil find:
The story of Ekgmowechashala, the final primate to inhabit North America before Homo sapiens or Clovis people, reads like a spaghetti Western: A grizzled and mysterious loner, against the odds, ekes out an existence on the American Plains. Except this tale unfolded about 30 million years ago, just after the Eocene-Oligocene transition during which North America saw great cooling and drying, making the continent less hospitable to warmth-loving primates.
Now, paleontologists from the University of Kansas and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing have published evidence in the Journal of Human Evolution shedding light on the long-standing saga of Ekgmowechashala, based on fossil teeth and jaws found in both Nebraska and China.
To do so, the researchers first had to reconstruct its family tree, a job helped by the discovery of an even more ancient Chinese “sister taxon” of Ekgmowechashala the team has named Palaeohodites (or “ancient wanderer”). The Chinese fossil discovery resolves the mystery of Ekgmowechashala’s presence in North America, showing it was an immigrant rather than the product of local evolution.
This is of considerable interest in a number of ways, but of course what I chose to investigate was the strange-looking name Ekgmowechashala. Wikipedia tells me it’s “Sioux: ‘little cat man’,” but that only goes so far; can anyone provide a lexical/morphological breakdown in Lakota/Dakota, and maybe tell me how it’s pronounced in the original language and/or by English-speaking biologists? (Perhaps Xerîb, who happens to have a copy of the New Lakota Dictionary and was so helpful about “Onhey!”)
since Igmú is said to stand for “cat” and “wecasha” for man, I assume that “la” is a diminutive suffix
I’ve seen it translated as “little fox-man”, which perhaps makes more sense…
In Lakȟóta at least, b d g are always followed by an unwritten schwa and then by l or m (or, I think, n). They are voiced, but seem to be predictable allophones of the voiceless lenes p t k.
From The Miocene faunas from the Wounded Knee area of western South Dakota, here (p. 171, fn. 1):
The species Ekgmowechashala philotau is named for “Mr. Philo G. Macdonald for his noteworthy assistance in the field; -tau is the Sioux possessive suffix.”
On p. 186 we also have Hitonkala andersontau, < hitonkala ‘mouse’, and on p. 194, Capatanka cankpeopi, < capa ‘beaver’ + tanka ‘large’, and Cankpeopi, Wounded Knee.
Thanks!
I wonder if the article/press-release is using the stunted definition of “North America” that stops at the Rio Grande because “North” is taken to be coextensive with “not Latin.” Because otherwise you’d think there would be some obvious monkey counterexamples to the “last one before H. sapiens” claim, like Alouatta pigra (range includes Belize*, Guatemala, and the Yucatan) and the related subspecies with the self-explanatory name Alouatta palliata mexicana. Those probably descend from ancestors who migrated north from South America, but it seems unlikely that that migration was more recent than human entry into the New World.
*Belize is of course a southern outpost of mainland Anglophony …
kg is an interesting cluster here that I’m only used to seeing as /kx/ in Afrikaans-inspired orthographies from South Africa and therearound. (And usually not further followed by a third consonant either!)
Thanks to Y for the link to J. Reid Macdonald’s monograph.
I wonder what Macdonald’s source for his Lakota forms was? Their spelling gives some indication of oral trasmission, such as -tau for the unapocopated form full form tȟáwa ‘belongs to him/her; is his/hers’ (in the orthography of the Lakota Language Consortium adopted in the New Lakota Dictionary). But Macdonald’s forms also use seem to use the c for /tʃ/ and /tʃʰ/ (as in <capa> ‘beaver’ (čhápa) or <ocaji> (očháže ‘kind, sort’), which indicates familiarity with non-English spelling conventions by some involved. I have not investigated the shifting orthographic conventions of Lakota during the 19th and 20th century in detail, but this plain c is used, for instance, in Lakota-English Dictionary (1970) that was assembled from the lexigraphical materials left Eugene Buechel after his death.
In the introduction to the monograph, Macdonald thanks Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Horncloud of Pine Ridge. This Joseph Horncloud must be one of the sons of Joseph Horn Cloud (Maȟpíya Hetȟúŋ), a survivor of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Compare this to Macdonald’s notes on pages 166 and 167 on his naming of the gymnure Ocajila makpiyahe:
Perhaps the Mr. and Mrs. Horncloud were among Macdonald’s sources?
I believe Ekgmowechashala in the orthography of the New Lakota Dictionary would be igmú wičhášala, but the NLD does not offer such form. Instead, for ‘monkey’, it has šúŋka wičháša (literally, ‘dog man’). Maybe other words circulated 60 years ago. I should probably write the Lakota Language Consortium to take note of this possible evidence for another lexical item, whether a nonce-formation or not. (The NDL diligently includes information about obsolete and obsolescent words and usages, so I would have expected its inclusion if they had noticed it. But perhaps obvious nonce-formations are excluded, or there are suspicions about the accuracy of the form.) Igmú covers all cats, such as the igmúgleza ‘bobcat’ (gléze ‘be striped or streaked’); igmútȟaŋka ‘mountain lion, puma’ (tȟáŋka ‘big, great’); igmúȟota ‘lynx’ (ȟóta ‘grey’; the Canada lynx is not found in the Dakotas, but is known in northern Minnesota). The corresponding Dakota form is ihmu, it seems.
I also checked Buechel’s dictionary, and there too, ‘monkey’ is śuƞka wicaśa (lit., ‘dog man’). (For igmú ‘cat’, Buechel has a note to the effect that igmú in the sense ‘domestic cat’ is short for an igmúšuŋkala ‘little cat-dog’. The NLD also gives the words pusína and kidí for ‘domestic cat’.)
The New Lakota Dictionary is available free in electronic form in the Apple App Store (here). As far as I can tell, only headwords can be searched (not all text), but you can search for any substring of characters, which is useful for a language like Lakota. The app also does not include the fine sketch grammar of the print version.
The app also does not include the fine sketch grammar of the print version.
Huh, “grammar sketch” is a term of art, according to an article at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig:
Grammar Sketch Outlines [PDF]
The full Lakota dictionary can be perused at archive.org, here, with the usual login and borrow-for-an-hour provision.
Ocajila makpiyahe
From previous experience, I did have the feeling that in my rush to comment I would miss something, which Xerîb would not.
“‘jg’ denotes soft ‘g’ as in rouge” suggests that these digraphs were made up by Macdonald, to get around the ambiguities of English writing. In other words, <kg> means /g/ g, not /d͡ʒ/ g.
The Tule River Tribe’s English-Yowlumni dictionary uses <bp>, <dt>, <gk>, <dts>, and <dch> for the unaspirated stop and affricate series.
Naturally, the genus Ekgmowechashala belongs in turn to tribe Ekgmowechashalini and subfamily Ekgmowechashalinae. All are excellent spelling bee material.
Probably they’re distinguishing “North” from “Central America”. Of course you’re right that New World monkeys reached Central America, i.e. the North American continent, long before humans did, they just didn’t get out of the rainforest.
@DM: JWB’s point is that even if you work with the concept of Central America, that traditionally doesn’t include Mexico, which is counted as part of North America geographically. . That’s why the trade agreement was NAFTA, not NAMFTA ;-).
That said, I have seen North America used as meaning “Canada plus the U.S.” so often that it doesn’t register as a mistake with me anymore.
Same here.
That narrow-scope sense of “North America” may have some practical advantages when talking about current political/cultural/economic issues. But for paleontology, not so much.
I remember one of my friends in high school was, for some reason, very taken with something he learned in Spanish III—that the (New World) Spanish word of somebody from the United States of America was norteamericano. My father and I both opined that that was a ridiculous formal term, the normal colloquial words being gringo or yanqui. (I assume gringo also applies to Canadians, but I don’t know about the other two.)
For me, “North America” meaning the US and Canada is especially, though not at all exclusively, associated with Canadians.
If you try to translate “Central America” into biogeography, it makes no sense to have it extend all the way north to the Rio
GrandeBravo del Norte; Yucatán is definitely Central – it’s much more Neotropical than Nearctic.Is there any place where the biogeographical gradient is sharp enough to call it a natural boundary between North and Central America?
@DM: And indeed in my school geography classes (Argentina, 1980s) we were taught that Yucatán belonged in Central America, and that therefore Mexico spanned two continents like the USSR or Egypt
@Y:
a glance at an ecoregion map (of north america, natch) has me ready to argue for the wet/dry and tropical/temperate lines running westnorthwest from the isthmus. but it doesn’t look to be all that sharp a border.
How boringly easy it would have been to write something like “the final New World primate to live north of the Yucatan before Homo sapiens.” At least if that would have made it accurate. Since we’re talking about a time period of tens of millions of years, with substantial variation in climate etc. along the way, perhaps the northernmost extent of the ecological niche hospitable to howler monkeys (and thus their range) was at some point along the way further north than it had become by historical times? I know nothing of what fossils may have been dug up where elsewhere in Mexico.
Alon, you were taught that Central America was a continent? How many continents were there altogether?
I understood Alon to mean he was taught that Mexico was partly in the continent of S. America (including C. America as a subset).
Oh, we’re talking about single-digit million years or not much more. New World monkeys got out of South America when it got close enough to the North American continent; IIRC, that was before the actual isthmus formed some 3.3 Ma ago, but not many Ma earlier than that. For tens of Ma, southern Mexico or all of Mexico had been suitable for monkeys, but no monkeys had reached it.
All that potential monkey joy unrealized. Sad!
And monkey business opportunities missed. Just think of the millions of barrels that could have been produced and bartered for bananas !
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The Australian continent, mostly New Guinea, has tree kangaroos instead.
And South America used to have a quite different group of marsupials in, AFAIK, something like the same role before the monkeys arrived across the sea from Africa (in a very dry period when there wasn’t much rainforest, so the oldest known New World monkeys actually lived on the ground in savanna or something…).
@Keith Ivey:
When talking about continents in a geopolitical sense, we certainly distinguished three Americas: South, Central (including the Caribbean islands) and North. That would make seven inhabited ones (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania) plus Antarctica, though I don’t think we paid any special attention to the number.
(That doesn’t make geological sense, of course, but then neither does distinguishing Asia from Europe.)
Looking at things like current educational materials or the press, that doesn’t seem to have changed.
Distinguishing Asia from Europe makes plenty of geological sense – but then you need finer divisions to be consistent. Like… Bohemia is a continent.
Biogeography cross-cuts Asia vs. Europe, of course; the Urals are a nonentity there.