Triangulation fails when neither linguistic, genetic, nor archaeological data support the Transeurasian narrative

Abstract

Robbeets et al.'s "Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages" (Nature 599, 616-621, 2021) argue that the dispersal of the so-called "Transeurasian" languages, a highly disputed language superfamily comprising the Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic language families, was driven by Neolithic farmers in the West Liao River region of China. They adduce evidence from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to support their claim. An admirable feature of the Robbeets et al.'s paper is that all their datasets can be accessed. However, a closer investigation of all three types of evidence reveals fundamental problems with each of them. Robbeets et al.'s analysis of the linguistic data does not conform to the minimal standards required by traditional scholarship in historical linguistics and contradicts their own stated sound correspondence principles. A reanalysis of the genetic data finds that they do not conclusively support the farming-driven dispersal of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, nor the two-wave spread of farming to Korea. Their archaeological data contain little phylogenetic signal, and we failed to reproduce the results supporting their core hypotheses about migrations. Given the severe problems we identify in all three parts of the "triangulation" process, we conclude that there is neither conclusive evidence for a Transeurasian language family nor for associating the five different language families with the spread of Neolithic farmers from the West Liao River region.

Combined lexical and phonotactic data resolves uncertainties in the evolutionary diversification of the Japonic language family

“…The Japonic languages spoken across the 3,000 km long Japanese archipelago form a fairly small family not demonstrably related to any others-see Tian et al (2022) contra Robbeets et al (2021), but also Vovin (2011Vovin ( , 2017, and Janhunen (2023). The Japonic languages are thought to have been brought to the archipelago by Bronze Age rice agriculturists who migrated there in the first millennium BCE (the Yayoi period; Hanihara, 1991;Hudson, Nakagome and Whitman, 2020).…”

Genomic perspectives on human dispersals during the Holocene

“…A provocative hypothesis argues that Korean, Japanese, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages all have a common origin (the "Transeurasian" macrofamily) and spread via farmers migrating from northeast China during the Early Neolithic (94). However, other studies question the existence of this macrofamily (95,96). In any case, overall, there is a strong signal of demic expansions associated with the spread of agriculture in East Asia.…”

Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

“…This skeleton is based on consonant-vowel profiles of the alignments and defaults to CV and VC. The preference of minimal CV/VC skeletons for aligned cognate sets is justified by linguistic practice (Tian et al, 2022) and can be adjusted to account for extended root structures, such as, for example, CVC . This means that only those results of the trimming pro-cedure are accepted that leave a core alignment of at least one consonant and one vowel, ignoring their particular order.…”