03.03.2026 Quentin Atkinson

Since Darwin, it has been recognised that languages, like species, evolve via a process of descent with modification. Darwin even used the notion of a global genealogy of the world’s languages to bolster his argument for the origin of species. Yet while biologists have gone on to infer genealogical relationships between all living things, including those at the root of the ‘tree of life’, until recently there has been no widely accepted global tree of the world’s languages. Newly available data and Bayesian inference techniques now make it possible to overcome many of the limitations of earlier work and generate a posterior distribution of global language trees. In this talk, I will showcase how, despite considerable phylogenetic uncertainty, we can explicitly model the process of human cultural evolution playing out over centuries and millennia along the branches of this treeset, and gain new insights into the past, present and future of human cultural and linguistic diversity.