Van Driem George L. Ethnolinguistic Prehistory: The Peopling of the World from the Perspective of Language, Genes and Material Culture

Brill, 2021. — 414 p. — (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library 26).This volume provides the most up-to-date and holistic but compact account of the peopling of the world from the perspective of language, genes and material culture, presenting a view from the Himalayas. The phylogeny of language families, the chronology of branching of linguistic family trees and the historical and modern geographical distribution of language communities inform us about the spread of languages and linguistic phyla. The global distribution and the chronology of spread of Y chromosomal haplogroups appears closely correlated with the spread of language families. New findings on ancient DNA have greatly enhanced our understanding of the prehistory and provenance of our biological ancestors. The archaeological study of past material cultures provides yet a third independent window onto the complex prehistory of our species.George L. van Driem, Ph.D. (1987), Leiden University, holds the Chair of Historical Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He has published several grammars of previously undescribed Himalayan languages and authored The Tale of Tea (Brill, 2019).