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linguistic archeology     In the paper Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family [Science 337, 957 (2012)], a team led by Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, researched the homeland of the Indo-European language family by adapting ‘phylogeographic’ methods initially developed by epidemiologists to trace the origins of virus outbreaks. Instead of comparing viruses, they compared languages and instead of DNA, they look for shared cognates – words that have a common origin, such as "mother," "mutter" and "madre" – across 83 modern languages as well as 20 ancient ones for which records are available. They used the cognates to infer a family tree of the languages and, together with information about the location of each language, they trace back through time to infer the location at the root of the tree – the origin of Indo-European.

Below are two of their graphs presenting the language expansion in time and space by colored areas while rollover graphs add a ‘language tree’ structure; more of the later you can see [HERE]. The critics of this work warn that Atkinson’s team may possibly have oversimplified presumptions for their calculations, strictly separating linguistic inference from large population movements and macroeconomics of each time period.

linguistic archeology of the Indo-European languages

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