Mismodeling Indo-European Origins: The Assault On Historical Linguistics | GeoCurrents

Presented by Martin W. Lewis and Asya Pereltsvaig, from Can language spread be modeled using computational techniques designed to trace the diffusion of viruses? As recently announced in the New York Times, a team of biologists claims to have solved one of the major riddles of human prehistory, the origins of the Indo-European language family, by applying methodologies from epidemiology. In actuality, this research, published in Science, does nothing of the kind. As the ta