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Abstract:
Ancestral kinship patterns have mostly been inferred (1) through reconstruction of kin terminologies in ancestral proto-languages using the linguistic comparative method, and (2) through geographic or distributional arguments based on the comparative patterns of kin terms and ethnographic kinship “facts” (e.g. Blust 1980; Mallory 1997; Murdock 1949). We stress that these data are detailed and carefully described, and valuable to the study of prehistory. However, the process through which conclusions have been drawn from these data fails to provide explicit criteria for systematic testing of alternative hypotheses, and the practice of "linguistic palaeontology" has been criticised (Clackson 2007). Accurate reconstruction of prehistoric social organisation is important if we are to put together satisfactory multidisciplinary scenarios about, for example, the dispersal of human groups. Such considerations apply in the case of Indo-European and Austronesian, two large-scale language families that are thought to be Neolithic expansions associated with new domestication technologies. We use language trees derived using phylogenetic tree-building techniques on vocabulary data. On these trees, we statistically reconstruct past marital residence in Indo-European and Austronesian societies, using comparative methods from evolutionary biology on ethnographic data. We compare our results to previous linguistic and anthropological inferences, including the relevant kin-terms, and show how these methods progress speculation into a testable scientific framework.
