Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geogra...

Oct 4, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 3)

In my previous posts (see here and here), I have analyzed Svetlana Burlak’s critique of Longobardi et al. (2015), posted on the Генофонд.рф website. The second critical response posted there is by geneticist Oleg Balanovsky (“Two...

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Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geogra...

Oct 1, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 2)

In the previous post, I began to analyze Svetlana Burlak’s critique of Longobardi et al. (2015), posted on Генофонд.рф website. As I pointed out, the idea that grammar is a better indicator of language relatedness finds new support...

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Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geogra...

Sep 29, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 1)

[Note: this is the first post of a three-part mini-series on this issue of genes, languages, and geography.] In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin conjectured that “the cultural transmission and differentiation of languages over...

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On the Basques, Their Genes, Their Language, and What They Mean for th...

Sep 18, 2015 by

On the Basques, Their Genes, Their Language, and What They Mean for the Indo-European Debate

On September 7, 2015, Michael Balter published an article in the Science Magazine discussing the recent research into the genetic heritage and language of the Basque people, particularly the study by a team of geneticists led by...

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Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings...

Sep 8, 2015 by

Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings

[Thanks to Martin Lewis for helpful discussions, for crafting the passages from our book cited below, and for excellent editorial comments on earlier drafts of this post.]   A recent article by a team of scholars led by Oleg...

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The Jews in India

Sep 4, 2015 by

The Jews in India

[This post was originally published in July 2012] My previous post discussed African groups claiming Jewish descent; in this post we consider Jewish groups from India, home to five Jewish groups of different antiquity, speaking...

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