Historical linguists have developed a careful set of procedures termed the ‘comparative method’ to infer ancestral states and construct language family trees. A vast amount of information about our past is inscribed in the content and structure of the approximately 7000 languages that are spoken today. Languages, like genes, are also ‘documents of history’. These inferences are more powerful when independent lines of evidence, such as information from studies of morphology, geology and palaeontology, are brought to bear on a common problem. Today, computational phylogenetic methods are routinely used to make inferences about evolutionary relationships and processes from these sequences. Similarities generally reflect common ancestry. Molecular sequences have inscribed in their structure a record of their past.
Our ability to do this was revolutionized by Zuckerkandl & Pauling's insight that molecules are ‘documents of evolutionary history’. And yet evolutionary biologists routinely make inferences about events millions of years in the past. Holt observed, the study of human history is ‘a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss’. Trying to make inferences about events 6000 years ago may seem close to impossible.
Trying to work out what happened 600 years ago is difficult enough.
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