ALUMNUS MARK SICOLI IN PLoS ONE

Mark Sicoli earned the BA in Linguistics and Anthropology at UCSC in 1995. He went on to earn the PhD in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 2007. Mark now has a position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University (where he is a colleague of PhD alumna Ruth Kramer). Mark’s research and teaching interests are in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology and he is a specialist in the Zapotec-Chatino language family. He and his colleague Gary Holton of the University of Alaska Fairbanks have recently published a paper in the general online science journal PLoS ONE entitled Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia. The paper, which has provoked a lot of interest, argues on linguistic grounds that the first Native Americans inhabited a large land-bridge in the area of what is now the Bering Strait for millennia and that linguistic migration patterns went in both directions across that bridge—from North America to Asia as well as from Asia to North America.