A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology
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.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Austronesian · concept · Taiwan, island Southeast Asia, Madagascar, Oceania · not located
- The Austronesian expansion · phenomenon · Island Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific · not located
- Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families · process · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Language trees support the express-train sequence of Austronesian expansion
Supports the agreement between the branching order of Austronesian language trees and the archaeological settlement sequence of the Pacific. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The volume number is given from standing knowledge and the page range is omitted rather than guessed.
Nature · 2000 · Partly verified
Gray, R. D. and Jordan, F. M., Nature, vol. 405 (2000)
Recorded on Austronesian
- Austronesian speakers move out of Taiwan
- Lapita voyagers enter Remote Oceania
- Dahl links Malagasy to Ma'anyan of southeastern Borneo
- Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
- A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology
- A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic
- Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
- A dated phylogeny puts Sino-Tibetan at roughly seven thousand years
- A second phylogeny puts the same family at roughly six thousand years
- A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin · 2023
- A dated phylogeny puts Sino-Tibetan at roughly seven thousand years · 2019
- A second phylogeny puts the same family at roughly six thousand years · 2019
- Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia · 2012
- A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic · 2003
- Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan · 1999
- Dahl links Malagasy to Ma'anyan of southeastern Borneo · 1951
- Lapita voyagers enter Remote Oceania · c. 1350–800 BCE