Genetics II
nThese were enthusiastically promoted at
the end of the 1980s and into the
early 1990s as the ‘New Synthesis’ or
‘Archaeogenetics’. The opus magnus of this trend was the appearance of ‘The
History and Geography of Human Genes’ (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994), which essays a major revision of the methodology for
exploring human history.
nLinguistic classifications of human populations
purport to offer a tool for outflanking simple racial models; more
abstract, they appear to provide an ideal analogue to the classificatory
trees output from DNA analyses.
nIf DNA
phylogenies and language trees were to
correspond, this would indeed be striking independent confirmation for models of human prehistory. Although this continues to play
well in the pages of the journal Nature, most archaeologists and linguists remain deeply sceptical.