Garden Variety Linguist on Nostr: I'm not quite following, can you elaborate a bit? Both biology & historical ...

I'm not quite following, can you elaborate a bit? Both biology & historical linguistics are very interesting topics to me, so I'm sure it's something to me!

I hadn't heard the specific term 'reticulate evolution' before - but the human family tree is sometimes described as being "more like a bush", lol. It's clearly easy for words & linguistic structures to move between languages, but it turns out interspecific hybridization & horizontal gene transfer are also surprisingly common.