Re: Q Atkinson

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> Has anyone read Quintin Atkinson latest pronouncement about IE in the New York Times and Nature? QA claims it's rooted in Anatolia. I'd like to hear from the linguists and mathematicians on the list.

I've looked at the account at http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ . I don't think it adds anything new to the original paper. The animation shows Indo-Iranian spreading eastwards from Anatolia, at which point we can conclude that considerations of geography have added nothing to the model.

The account does not seem to come clean on which disinformation has been shorn from the inputs. For example, it seems they've removed the uninformative expansion of IE languages to the Americas, but left in the eastward expansion of Russian.

Richard.