The article “Comparing Genes and Linguistic Sounds Across Human Populations Worldwide” written by a group of biologists of Stanford University (Nicole Creanza, Marcus Feldman, Sohini Ramachandran) provides us with a joint analysis of data on genomics, linguistics, and geography. It is devoted to finding some links between the transference of genes between human populations and the sounds of their languages. First, the authors draw our attention to the history of the study of languages and evolutionary history. They emphasize that the evolution of human species is very different from that of a language, since languages, in contrast to genes, can change much more quickly and are not necessarily inherited from parents. However, it was found that populations of similar genetic groupings tend to belong to the same language family. The authors have analyzed data to examine the imprints of human population history on both DNA variation and variations of phonemes of more than two thousands of languages. They have discovered that the closer two languages were to one another, the more similar they were, even if they were not of the same language family. However, many phenomena of either linguistic or geographical history of the humanity were not closely connected between each other, those are: the spatial structuring in languages, regional human migrations, the human expansion out of Africa and some others. The authors conclude that studies of the history of human evolution benefit from a multipronged approach, that means that incorporation of biological data into linguistic researches and vice versa can bring some new discoveries to both the field of linguistic studies and biological ones.

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