The clumps of Iraqoian in the South east includes Cherokee. However the Cherokee are not ethnic cousins of the Iraqois, in fact they may have originally come from Mexico, moving up to the great lakes where they got their language and then down to the southeast.

Also, any such map is neccessarily a reconstruction because prior to and just after Pizarros visit to North America, large swaths of the continent from Cahokia, accross the river, to the northeast Ohio to the South west all had a similar cultural pattern that, if you see the artifacts, was closely related to Meso-American. Unfortunately after DeSoto two things happened, very bad disease and drought. This wide trading, very organized civilization collapsed and disappeared [mostly referred to as Mississipean]. When Europeans again appeared inland they would find Cherokee living in mounded villages, but with no memory of who built the mounds. DeSoto had reported floating down the Mississippi and seeing villages every few hundred yards, but by the time the French explorers got there it was empty.

Great map! National Geographic also has some good maps of Native American groups, civilizations, and languages.

Kirk: I read that none of the languages are considered “traceable” to Asia (including Mayan, unless you believe the guy who is trying to prove that theree was once only one language), but that there are a very small number of scholars who would like to prove that somehow, they are. But in reality, they are counted as totally separate families by nearly all linguists.

PS- Can we infer from this map that the Uto-Aztekans were the first border guards between Canada and the United States, and the US and Mexico, or what?

Michael Coe’s argument (I’m referring to the Yale anthropologist, just fyi) was, as I remember it, based on other factors such as ceramics. He didn’t claim that the case was bulletproof, but thought it a plausible theory.

We know that the Polynesians made it, at least to South America, if not to California; American sweet potatoes were grown in Polynesia before European contact. Others see similarities in language and boat construction between the Chumash of the Southern California coast and the Polynesians, suggesting visits by Polynesian explorers in the first millennium AD.
As for the Tarascans and the possible connection to the Andes, there seems to have been a flourishing sea trade from the Pacific coast of Mexico to the Ecuadoran coast in pre-Columbian times; the Ecuadoran Indians imported spondylus shells from Mexico on oceangoing balsa rafts. The use of bronze weapons by the Tarascans suggests ties to the Andes; as bronze was in wide use there by 1000 AD, whereas it was rare or nonexistent in most regions of Mexico.
For Indians in general, a good reference is Charles Mann’s 1491 (which does a very good job of dispelling both traditional settler and modern politically-correct myths about the native peoples of the Americas); for North America in particular (especially the first contacts with Europeans) a good source is Colin Calloway’s One Long Winter Count.
As for tracing languages to Asia, this is certainly possible with Eskimo-Aleut, which is still spoken in eastern Siberia. It has frequently been argued that there is a connection between Athapaskan and some isolated languages in central Siberia (the Yeniseian languages such as Ket and Yugh).*

*Yeniseian speakers were apparently one of the groups that made up the Hunnic (Xiongnu) confederation.

I’m not sure, and this may be nitpicking, but wouldn’t the “Eskimo-Aleut” family not be considered one of the “Amerindian Languages?” My understanding was always that the indigenous peoples of the north were not considered to be “red Indians,” and that they entered the Western Hemisphere after the original Bering crossing.