Comment on "Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa".
We show that Atkinson's (Reports, 15 April 2011, p. 346) intriguing proposal--that global linguistic diversity supports a single language origin in Africa--is an artifact of using suboptimal data, biased methodology, and unjustified assumptions. We criticize his approach using more suitable data, and we additionally provide new results suggesting a more complex scenario for the emergence of global linguistic diversity.
Research Unit Quantitative Language Comparison, Ludwig Maximilian University, Geschwister Scholl Platz 1, D-80539 Munich, Germany. cysouw@lmu.de
Michael
M
Cysouw
Dan
D
Dediu
Steven
S
Moran
D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics