Replacement of the expanding farmers’ language in the original homeland, after the expansion began. If this happened, modern language distributions might conflict with the combined evidence from genes, archaeology, skeletons, and domesticates. The original homeland might now either lack the original farmers’ language family altogether, or else might support only one branch of the family compared with many branches in the periphery. Suggested examples of this tend to be controversial because they involve eradication of the original languages that can now, at best, only be reconstructed. Nevertheless, this seems to us the most plausible interpretation in some cases. For instance, one can suggest that languages closely related to Austronesian, Indo-European, and Japanese are no longer spoken in their putative ultimate homelands in South China, Anatolia, and Korea, respectively, because of the historical expansions of the Sinitic languages, Turkish, and Korean. The discovery of written documents attesting to the former existence of Hittite and other now-extinct Indo-European languages in Anatolia as well as the resulting big changes in our understanding of that language family confirm the reality of language loss in the potential homeland for that family (31, 32). Hunter-gatherer expansions. Not only farmers, but also sometimes hunter-gatherers, can expand at the expense of other huntergatherers, producing concordance of genes and languages without crops. Examples include the Inuit expansion eastwards across the Canadian Arctic and the Athabaskan expansion southward into the southwestern United States within the last millenium (33–35).
