ABSTRACT
While reflective of a single history of our species, archaeology, evolutionary population genetics and historical linguistics measure separate parameters. Since these often span different temporal and spatial scales, inconsistencies between them can occur. Furthermore, the complicating and homogenising factors of cultural borrowing, language shifts and gene flow operate in all human contexts creating potentially misleading parallelisms (Bellwood 2001). Therefore, the recovery of the history of populations from a comparison of archaeology, genetics and language cannot be a matter of proof but rather the balance of evidence for a hypothesis through correlation.
