Tuesday, January 14 / 3:00 P.M. / Free McCune Conference Room / 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that new insights into prehistoric human migrations can be gained by an interdisciplinary approach that combines linguistics, genetics, and archeology. Although the results of the three disciplines are in principle independent -- and indeed some early attempts to postulate too close a correlation among them were problematic -- a clearer picture can be attained through hypotheses that are consistent with the combined evidence. Four illustrative examples are discussed in some detail: the settlement of Madagascar by speakers of Austronesian languages; the origins of the Haruai people on the fringe of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea; the demographic implications of the arrival of Azerbaijani, a Turkic language, into the Caucasus; and relations between the introduction of agriculture, of new populations, and of Indo-European languages into Europe. Dr. Bernard Comrie is the world's leading figure in the field of language universals and linguistic typology. In 1997, he became Director of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he conducts radically multidisciplinary research with colleagues in primatology, archaeology and genetics. Among his many publications are his highly influential books Tense, Aspect, and Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. <<Back Top of Page