The Uses a Macro-Family Gets Put To

This entry sits in a religion atlas mainly as a caution, and the caution is worth stating plainly. Deep language groupings get borrowed, repeatedly, to argue for an original religion of humanity or of some large ancestral population, on the reasoning that if the languages descend from one source then so, presumably, do the beliefs of their speakers. Neither half of that inference survives inspection. The linguistic premise is contested at exactly the depth the argument needs it. And even where a family is beyond dispute, as Indo-European is, comparative work recovers words rather than beliefs, and it recovers them without dates, so the reconstruction of a shared religious vocabulary at a depth of five thousand years is already a stretched piece of work.

At three times that depth nothing survives to compare. The same warning applies to a related family of claims, which use proposed macro-families to attach a modern population to a prestigious ancient one. The atlas records Nostratic accurately, with its advocates named and its status marked, precisely so that a reader meeting the word in a book about ancient wisdom can find out what the linguists actually think and decide for themselves.