TY - JOUR
T1 - Language evolution and human history: What a difference a date makes
AU - Gray, Russell
AU - Atkinson, Quentin D.
AU - Greenhill, Simon
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Historical inference is at its most powerful when independent lines of evidence can be integrated into a coherent account. Dating linguistic and cultural lineages can potentially play a vital role in the integration of evidence from linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and genetics. Unfortunately, although the comparative method in historical linguistics can provide a relative chronology, it cannot provide absolute date estimates and an alternative approach, called glottochronology, is fundamentally flawed. In this paperwe outline howcomputational phylogeneticmethods can reliably estimate language divergence dates and thus help resolve long-standing debates about human prehistory ranging from the origin of the Indo-European language family to the peopling of the Pacific.
AB - Historical inference is at its most powerful when independent lines of evidence can be integrated into a coherent account. Dating linguistic and cultural lineages can potentially play a vital role in the integration of evidence from linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and genetics. Unfortunately, although the comparative method in historical linguistics can provide a relative chronology, it cannot provide absolute date estimates and an alternative approach, called glottochronology, is fundamentally flawed. In this paperwe outline howcomputational phylogeneticmethods can reliably estimate language divergence dates and thus help resolve long-standing debates about human prehistory ranging from the origin of the Indo-European language family to the peopling of the Pacific.
U2 - 10.1098/rstb.2010.0378
DO - 10.1098/rstb.2010.0378
M3 - Article
VL - 366
SP - 1090
EP - 1100
JO - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B
JF - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B
IS - 1567
ER -