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Random causes with directed effects: the Indo-European language spread and the stochastic loss of lineages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

John Robb
John Robb*
Affiliation:
Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109, USA
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Extract

Since the beginning, studies of Indo-European have seen it as a large phenomenon necessarily having a large, usually single cause. Yet apparent pattern can arise from chance causes that need have no great historical order. In a minimalist view, set out here as a theoretical hypothesis, the pattern of Indo-European can simply arise from a kind of social Brownian motion, in which a large pattern invents itself out of countless little perturbations between adjacent language communities

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Notes
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Antiquity , Volume 65 , Issue 247 , June 1991 , pp. 287 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1991

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