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Linguistics

Talking trees tell tales

Nature volume 405, pages 1008–1009 (2000)Cite this article

On page 1052 of this issue1, Russell Gray and Fiona Jordan describe how they have used a tool from molecular taxonomy, the ‘parsimony’ method, to examine patterns of DNA sequence change over time and to probe the history of a group of languages. Parsimony is a central principle in the cladistic approach to evolutionary biology; it holds that the evolutionary tree requiring the fewest transformations of characters should be preferred. Words do not fossilize. Yet they leave evidence of their evolution in the populations that speak them, in much the same way that genes reveal the evolutionary history of the populations that transmit them.

Gray and Jordan's subject of study is the spread of the Austronesian language family eastwards across the Pacific several thousand years ago. What makes their approach novel is the explicitly quantitative test of the hypothesis that the evolution of a material culture, as traced by archaeological artefacts and other evidence, can be mapped onto the evolution of a language family in ordered and nested steps.

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Figure 1: Peopling the Pacific.

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  1. Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 96822, Hawaii, USA

    Rebecca L. Cann

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  1. Rebecca L. Cann
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Correspondence to Rebecca L. Cann.

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Cann, R. Talking trees tell tales. Nature 405, 1008–1009 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35016679

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