52: Ancient Indigenous languages near Antarctica?

 

This article consists of interconnected subjects pertaining to possible indigenous languages (and cultures) spoken near to Antarctica, with a note about some of my recent other publications at the end. This article was written by Linden Alexander Pentecost and published on the 17th of January 2025 only on www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk. Article contains 950 words. This article also discusses the possibility of indigenous people in the Falkland Islands, as well as in those islands just north of Antarctica.

 

Antarctica, a strange land. Have I ever been? No. But I suppose that few have. I met a man who used to work at an Antarctic research station. Apparently, they used to initiate new crewmates by showing them the film, The Thing, which is a terrifying cosmic horror story set on an Antarctic base. I remember thinking that showing them this film was both slightly mean and slightly amusing.

There is a reason I brought up The Thing. Antarctica has long been associated with weird things, pyramids and much else, including in the fictional writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Recently, I wrote about the vague evidence of conlangs and/or fictional cosmic languages in H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, as well as in some of his other publications, and my own experiences of learning about them. He writes of ancient hieroglyphs, and of beings called “elder things” who communicate in whistling noises, through pipe-like organs in their bodies. This article can be viewed at this web address: https://www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk/website-articles-46-55/50-lovecraftian-language-and-more-on-uyulala and is titled: 50: Lovecraftian language and more on Uyulala - (Note that Uyulala also connects to the South Pole in a sense, and information about this is in the aforementioned article. The aforementioned article is fairly long. 

 

But what of real life languages in ancient Antarctica, is that possible?
The short answer is: no. Even the outlying islands to the north of the Antarctic Continent, whilst free of the ice sheets, are so inhospitable that even living there for a short time would have proved to be extremely difficult, but perhaps not entirely impossible.

There are some possible Polynesian accounts of visits to Antarctica, and in addition, I think it entirely possible that Fuegian peoples and their ancestors could have reached the islands further south, just north of Antarctica. My research on words for “boat” in these languages, and the similarity to Quechuan and Uralic words for “boat” for example does seem to imply that the Fuegians were absolutely connected to a wider world. 

There is possible evidence that Fuegian indigenous peoples reached the Falkland Islands first, and there are from what I gather, some possible examples of indigenous shell middens there. This is something I will have to read up more on in the future. The following paper talks about vertebrate bones in middens, and an example of a quartzite lithic point found in the Falklands, both of which, along with other evidence, seem to indicate that indeed pre-Columbian peoples were present in the Falklands. The paper is titled: Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands, by Kit M. Hamley, Jacquelyn L. Gill, Kathryn E. Krasinski, Dulcinea V. Groff, Brenda L. Hall, Daniel H. Sandweiss, John R. Southon, Paul Brickle, Thomas V. Lowell.

But essentially, it could perhaps be possible that a language, in some way connected to the Fuegian languages (which are not all in the same language family), could have once been spoken in places like South Shetland, and other islands north of Antarctica but south of Cape Horn; especially considering that there appears to be evidence of Fuegians or their ancestors on the Falkland Islands, which is a significant distance from Tierra del Fuego. 

Although I have not read this source, there is a source, a book, which appears to be written about this entire subject, with suggestion of possible evidence of human activity on the islands south of Tierra del Fuego and near Antarctica. This source is titled: Vol. VI Arqueología histórica antártica: participación de aborígenes sudamericanos en las actividades de cacería en los mares subantárticos durante el siglo XIX by Rubén Stehberg.

Could they have spoken a language distantly connected to Fuegian languages? Could Polynesians have known about them too, and could Polynesian languages have a connection to whatever was potentially spoken south of Tierra del Fuego, as well? 

This subject becomes even more interesting when one considers the maps of Antarctica which clearly show the coastlines of the continent as they would have been without ice. I feel that at some point in mankind's history, perhaps not as long ago as we think, Antarctica may have been much more connected to human cultures in different parts of the world. Nothing else surely could explain these things. I have no evidence that indigenous American peoples in South America as a whole, for example in the Andes, were aware of Antarctica. But honestly, I would really not be at all surprised if they did, and nor would I be at all surprised if indigenous peoples of South America have oral histories pertaining to Antarctica.

 

This article has been quite short and not very conclusive, but I hope to have introduced this very fascinating concept in an easily understandable way, and I hope to read the book by Rubén Stehberg when I can. 

 

Note:

 

Note that recently I published another article on this website titled: 51: On documenting Beurla Reagaird. The information in the aforementioned article about Beurla Reagaird is entirely different from the brief mention of Beurla Reagaird in my entirely separate recently published Kindle-only ebook, titled: THE CIUTHAICH - CIUTHACH: MYSTERIOUS ANCESTORS OF WESTERN SCOTLAND (SMALL KINDLE-ONLY PUBLICATION), BOOK 1 OF SCOTLAND’S ANCIENT CAVE FOLKS (SCOTLAND'S ANCIENT CAVE FOLKS).