Nick Wade has an article titled World’s Farmers Sowed Languages as Well as Seeds. The following summations near the end capture my view:
Dr. Christopher Ehret of U.C.L.A., an expert in the history of African languages, said the authors had overstated the role of agriculture in explaining the pattern of language distribution.
“In reality, the spread of language families has come about for different reasons in different times and places, but one of the causes has sometimes been the development of agriculture,” Dr. Ehret said.
…
But Dr. Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, said although he disagreed with Dr. Diamond on some aspects of Indo-European, “I expect that his synthesis will be useful.”
And Dr. Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford, an expert on language families, said the two authors had put together a “very useful overview.”
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