A linguistics analysis shows that language arrived in North America in multiple waves from Siberia. The Americas have half of the world’s linguistic diversity, despite a much shorter human history.

Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...