A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology

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Russell Gray and Fiona Jordan applied phylogenetic tree-building to Austronesian lexical data and compared the resulting branching order with the archaeological sequence of island settlement in the Pacific, reporting agreement with the rapid dispersal from Taiwan often called the express-train model. The significance for method is that two independent bodies of evidence — sound correspondences among living languages, and radiocarbon dates on pottery and settlement — were made to predict each other, which is the closest historical linguistics comes to an experimental test.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.