Prospects
As these findings from different parts of the world show, linguistic reconstruction wields a powerful set of tools for revealing the extent and variety of early agricultural knowledge and practice among human societies around the globe.
In many cases this kind of study greatly enriches the story that the archaeological record can tell. The findings of linguistic historical reconstruction are essential to identifying the language affiliations of the peoples of earlier times, and its discoveries can, as well, identify new regions and new topics for investigation by archaeologists and archaeobotanists and suggest new agendas to be explored by those disciplines. In addition, tracing the routes of word-borrowing among languages can clarify the directions in which new knowledge spread. The transmission of words for goat and sheep from early Cushites to Nilo-Saharans in the seventh millennium BcE is a striking example.And linguistic reconstruction is not just a helpmeet for archaeology. The resources of language can fill gaps in historical knowledge that archaeology may not be able or suited to fill. Uncovering the kinship systems of earlier
as Hurrian. This extraordinarily high borrowing rate, together with the fact that the loanwords intrude even into parts of the lexicon in which borrowing only rarely takes place, makes an extraordinarily strong case that the speakers of proto-Anatolian and each of its descendant languages, such as Hittite, Luwian, and Lydian, were intruders into the Anatolian regions.
peoples is a prime example. The linguistic record can also supplement the material record where preservation conditions are poor, most especially in the case of tuber crops such as yams and taro, which are rarely preserved in the material record, or for crops cultivated in areas where the environmental conditions limit the preservation of crop remains of any kind.[126] In every part of the world there is still much more to do and so much more that linguistic studies of history can reveal about our common human past.