12 November 2023

eLetter to Science: Archaeolinguistic anachronisms in the Indo-European phylogeny of Heggarty et al. 2023

Tree diagram showing the discrepancies between the chronological claims of Heggarty et al. 2023 and dateable archeological technologies.
Archaeologocially datable technologies for which we can reconstruct semantic fields of vocabulary plotted onto the tree of Heggarty et al. 2023

In July 2023, the Indo-European Cognate Relations Database was finally published after many years of hard work, mostly at the Max Planck Institute in Jena and Leipzig. The database is also the backbone of the widely shared but rather controversial study "Language trees with sampled ancestors support an early origin of the Indo-European languages" by Heggarty et al.

Researchers from Roots of Europe have written a response in the form of an eLetter to Science, pointing out some archaeolinguistic discrepancies between the dates the study arrives as through bayesian statistical analysis of replacements in the basic vocabulary, and some archaeologically dateable technologies for which linguists can reconstruct vocabulary of entire semantic fields.

You can read the letter here (under the article).

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