Claire Bowern’s research featured in Nature and Science

September 30, 2016

Congratulations are in order for associate professor Claire Bowern​, who is one of several authors on a recent article in Nature titled “A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia.” The paper describes the genetic history of Aboriginal Australia, particularly of speakers of Pama-Nyungan languages. It includes discussion of how the genetic tree matches the linguistic diversification of Pama-Nyungan languages.

Michael Erard, the 2016 winner of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America, discusses the Nature paper in a Science feature article called “Solving Australia’s language puzzle.” The feature focuses on Claire’s contributions to the Nature paper through her use of Bayesian computational phylogenetic methods applied to data from her CHIRILA lexical database in order to model the linguistic history of Pama-Nyungan and the other indigenous language families of Australia.

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