On topic: one small thing I'd say is that big journeys by sea are rare before the modern era; only a small fraction of societies seem to be comfortable doing this. So, for example, your westermost family, why do two separate branches expand into the southern islands? It's certainly not impossible... but I'd expect it to be more likely for one group to expand into the islands, and then, having become seagoing, to expand into the other islands as well, rather than two branches independenly becoming seagoing. Or else, if the shift to a seagoing society occured on the mainland, for those people to have also expanded up and down the coast, as well as hopping to the islands.
You'd find it useful to do multiple maps showing family distribution over time, allowing a better sense of branch locations. And remember: although we think of 'families' as blocks, they're really just the limit of our reconstructive ability. These 'family trees' are only the visible buds of a much larger plant. And they're probably not equivalent to one another: a 'language family' may have expanded 500 years ago, or 20,000 years ago, or anywhere in between...
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qwed117 wrote: ↑26 Dec 2020 04:11
Generally speaking the movement of languages is not unidirectional, so there's generally a lot of intermixing between the areas of the languages, moreso than what I can see on the map. For example, the "Indo-European peoples" were first present in the steppes of west Kazakhstan and south Russia. One group moved east and south to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and "became" the "Indo-Iranian people".
A brief tangent: this probably isn't true.
First, there's debate about the exact homeland of Late Proto-Indo-European, but it was probably in Ukraine, possibly even western Ukraine, rather than Kazakhstan. [the homeland of Proto-Indo-Hittite is even more unknown, and it might have been in Anatolia, or even the Balkans. However, it seems most likely to have been Ukraine as well].
More importantly: it's now known that the Indo-Iranians did NOT move east and south from an urheimat on the steppe. Instead, there was first a movement from the steppe into the northeast european forests (the Corded Ware Culture) - THEN there was a movement from the forests BACK onto the steppe (the Sintashta Culture), and thence southward. Genetically, there's a strong European-farmer element in Indo-Iranian that wasn't present on the steppe originally.
The connexion to language families is a little debatable. Sintashta is clearly Indo-Iranian - not only is this genetically clear, but it's also clear that the warlike, chariot-riding, fire-worshipping Sintashta people are a very good match for the people described in Vedic and Zoroastrian sources.
I think it's most likely that Corded Ware is the ancestor of everything except Tocharian, Anatolian and Greek (and maybe Armenian?). [the use of the augment in Greco-Armenian and Indo-Iranian would then be an areal sprachbund on the steppe, or perhaps a shared retention lost in the west].
Another thing I see in your map is a lot of movement around the torrid and subtropical zones, which, while it does happen (cf. the Austronesian family; some Amerindian families iirc), is not particularly common without some factor mitigating the difficult of transport
Citation needed? I don't see why this would be a particular issue. Rapid expansion has happened in Africa, and repeatedly in South America (all of which was populated from zero within centuries).
