How Our Languages Help Understand Our Origins
— from the Indo-European World to the Andes
Humans have always striven to make sense of the past, and their own origins. Clues survive in many forms: documents left to historians, material culture uncovered by archaeologists; our immaterial that and the past languages linguists can partly reconstruct;
but all of them offers only a very incomplete perspective, of whatever fragmented record of the past survives — whether in material culture left to archaeologists, or the immaterial that linguists can partly reconstruct; the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
My take emerges from linguistics, but the past record can only be properly understood in the context
As these have long since parted ways as each discipline developed and refined its own very different techniques of the Andes runs back through many millennia of prehistory. F