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be understood against the background of the well-documented consensus which now accepts
     that some languages have evolved from others. This was formally first set out in the
     late-eighteenth century by a British civil servant and judge in Colonial India, William
     Jones, who observed the similarities between Sanskrit and several modern European
     languages. * And we know, for example,
     that Spanish and French are derived from Latin, which itself developed out of
     proto-Italic. 17 In fact, all but a handful of European languages
     have evolved from a proto-Indo-European root, meaning that thousands of years ago, many
     of the languages from the Atlantic to the Himalayas had a common source. A very similar
     exercise has been carried out with the languages of North America. Some of the scenarios
     constructed by linguists fit neatly with what we may call the LGM consensus. For example, Robert Dixon, an Australian linguist, has
     calculated that a dozen separate groups speaking different languages entered the
     Americas between about 20,000 and 12,000 years ago. Daniel Nettle, an English linguist,
     on the other hand, argues that the diversity of languages spoken in the New World today
     began in the last 12,000 years – i.e., after they arrived in America.
    It is fair to say that linguistic research is on less secure grounds than
     the genetic or archaeological evidence, for the very good reason that we have no real
     way of knowing what languages people spoke in the past, especially before the invention
     of writing. The only evidence we have for non-literate societies are the languages
     spoken today, their geographical spread across the world, and some idea of how, and at
     what rate, languages change or evolve. This is better than nothing but it still means
     that our reconstructions of past languages are at best theoretical and at worst
     speculative. This is why the field of ‘chronolinguistics’, or
     ‘glottochronology’, has been so controversial. In all that follows, it is
     as well to keep the above observations in mind.
    In principle, the operation of comparative linguistics is simple. For
     example, the word for ‘two’ in Sanskrit is duvá , in
     classical Greek it is duo , in Old Irish it is dó , and in Latin it
     is duo . Thousands of similar examples could be given, to underline the point that
     specific languages are related. The controversy arises over just how similar languages
     have to be in order for them to be regarded as stemming from a common origin. This is a
     field divided – notoriously – into ‘lumpers’ and
     ‘splitters’, where the former favour a relatively small number of language
     families spread across the world, and the latter play down these linkages. If we note
     here, prominently, that the splitters are every bit as eminent as the lumpers, and that
     the splitters’ central message is that very few conclusions may be drawn about
     the spread of languages around the world, and that this should be borne in mind in what
     follows, we may then proceed to examine what the lumpers say. (It is also worth
     reminding ourselves that, in the genetic studies reported above, overlaps were found
     between genetics and language, suggesting that the lumpers have at least a case.)
    Map 6 shows the major language families of the world, according to Joseph
     Greenberg, an American linguist and one of the major (and most controversial)
     ‘lumpers’. This reveals that there are three major language families in
     the New World – Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene and Amerind. On the face of it, this would
     suggest three waves of migration. Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist/anthropologist from
     Stanford University (and also a director of the Santa Fe Institute), in a re-analysis of
     Greenberg’s material, suggests that Amerind is a form of the Eurasiatic family,
     but whereas Eskimo-Aleut is a branch of the Eurasiatic family, ‘Amerind is
     related to Eurasiatic as a whole’, and is no closer to