Historical Bio-Linguistics:A biostatistic approach to the study of linguistic phylogenies and the correlation of genetic, linguistic and geographical data.

Demographic events often leave traces in languages and genes: this prompted Darwin’s prediction that the evolutionary tree of human populations would provide the best possible phylogeny of language relationships. We tested Darwin’s expectation through long-distance genome-language comparisons across Eurasia, relying on independently assessed quantitative tools on both sides. To do so, we had to resort to a linguistic method able to compare across different families, based on abstract syntactic characters, which proved more apt for long-term historical reconstruction than phonemic ones.