5. Jefferson's Hypotheses
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Jefferson's main goal of the excavation was to
rediscover the cultural aspects of the burial mound, specifically on how it was
built and for what purpose. Jefferson continued to outline the different mounds
in the locality of his home and the speculation surrounding their development.
Through the analysis of the existing languages in Asia compared to current Native American tribes Jefferson further predicts that Native American populations were the descendants of ancient Asian peoples. This conclusion allowed Jefferson to extrapolate that since there are no recognizable similarities between the two modern languages between Asia and North America that the ancestors of current Native Americans could potentially have been similar to that of “the age of the earth.”[1] This cutting-edge idea of linguistic comparison was concluded with his final statement on the topic, “A greater number of those radical changes of language have taken place among the red men of America, proves them of greater antiquity than those of Asia.”[2] The modern theories of how the Americas were originally populated offer some support for Jefferson’s remarkably well predicted hypotheses.