The song of the last Beothuk

Following on from my comments about extinct languages and cultures in the discussion of my last post, here's a fascinating if almost tear-jerking article I found in my researches. I was reading about the Tunit, the Dorset people - a distantly-related ancestral culture to the Inuit, about whom the Inuit have many legends and stories. Thought long dead, their last surviving group, the Sadlermiut, actually died out in the early years of the 20th Century - probably of TB or typhoid. So close and yet so far.

Another extinct Indian group from the Canada/Newfoundland region were the Beothuk. They were researched by Frank Speck, but the last of them, Shawnandithit, died in 1829 - of TB.

And yet, by a vanishingly remote chance, there is an audio recording of one of their traditional songs. But how could this exist, when was cylinder recording came in a century after the last Beothuk died?

Read on - and listen to the song, and a modern reconstruction of it.