11 Human Evolutionary Diversity Chapter 2 Human Evolutionary Diversity: Implications for Historical Linguistics an archaeological or anthropological perspective. In- deed, most people feel qualified to contribute to ar- chaeological and anthropological discussions! This inter-disciplinarity has enriched our understanding of the past in several ways. Inferences drawn from different data sets can provide independent sup- porting evidence for particular reconstructions of events and relations; these may reveal different pat- terns in the biological, cultural or economic aspects of certain events, thus providing insights into the mechanisms behind them; and finally, these provide temporal and/or spatial frameworks, depending on the strength of each field, around which other disci- plines can develop their hypotheses. Although this interaction across disciplines is only just beginning to consolidate, few would now attempt a historical reconstruction of the human past without taking into account facts from archaeology, genetics and anthro- pology. This inter-disciplinarity has not yet fully ex- tended to historical linguistics. Archaeologists (Ren- frew 1992; 1998), geneticists (Cavalli-Sforza 1991; Barbujani et al. 1994; Sajantila et al. 1995; but see also Bandelt et al. 2002) and palaeoanthropologists (Lahr & Foley 1998) have all interlaced facts from histori- cal linguistics into the reconstructions of either past processes (e.g. Ladino genes/languages) or events (Indo-European/Neolithic). This interaction, how- ever, has neither become comprehensive, nor, more importantly, have the temporal and spatial patterns drawn from palaeoanthropology and genetics been fully integrated into the reconstruction of language history. The underlying theme of this paper is that the interpretation of the evolution of human lan- guages is not free from historical demographic con- straints. In arguing that the scale of cultural change manifested in the spread of language families had to be associated with a historical-economic change of similar magnitude, like the spread of agriculture, Marta Mirazón Lahr Colin Renfrew’s innovative research in ‘Archaeo- genetics’, using molecular genetics to investigate whether such expansions as expressed in the spread of language families were originally effected through the movement of genes (and thus various modes of expansion of peoples) or not, has boosted a renewed interest among archaeologists and anthropologists on the role of history in shaping human diversity. His models have provided a much needed theoreti- cal framework for interpreting late population dis- persals in archaeology, and thus bridge the gap between the early and more recent history of human populations. The early history of human populations is largely considered by most linguists to be beyond the reach of historical linguistics, and thus to some extent, a different problem. The justification for fo- cusing on the earlier phases of that history is the belief that an integration of historical linguistics into broader anthropological and evolutionary models requires a full understanding of the context in which human origins and diversification occurred. The early diversification of peoples and their particular bio- logical and cultural trajectories constrain the possi- bilities for linguistic diversification in the more recent past, and as such forms the evolutionary framework within which historical linguistics needs to operate. Historical linguistics is a discipline driven more by internal concerns than developments beyond its boundaries. Linguistic reconstruction and phylo- genetics is such a specialized field that that few out- siders can usefully contribute to debates (Colin Renfrew is probably one of the very few who have done so, not always to the pleasure of linguists!). This contrasts with archaeology and anthropology. Although specialist knowledge is always necessary to resolve particular issues, a large number of fields and expertise contribute to the investigation of hu- man evolutionary history, whether approached from