vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:Finding attestations of just one unknown Indo-European language could upend our understanding of the whole family (as has happened a few times already).
I think they
should do this but often don't, in part because people tend to ignore new evidence in this context IME.
Well, I'm sure linguistics, like many other scientific fields, is susceptible to human foibles such as not wanting to be wrong. Even though the scientific process is based upon hypothesis and theories as well as the desire to keep changing our understanding of the world around us, in practice the aspects of human nature that foster competition, resentment, etc. seem to create blinders for many scientists, not allowing them to truly be open to new findings that could upend their previously held beliefs.
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For example (and this is going to be my rant that's off-topic to linguistics but on-topic to my point above), the presence of megalithic structures from ancient history and possibly pre-history should open our minds. While I personally don't believe there's any credence to theories such as ancient aliens, lizard people, etc., I do think that the existence of these structures should question our generally held belief that homo sapiens sapiens as a species has gotten more intelligent and advanced with the progression of time, and that our ancestors were simpler, less advanced and dumber than we are today. We are still figuring out how some of the structures were created using, again to our understanding of history, only the simple tools that would have been available during those periods. Yet, despite all this evidence that we don't have the full picture and perhaps our ancestors were more advanced and intelligent than we believed, it seems to me that many in the scientific community still hold to the belief that modern humanity is the current pinnacle of homo sapiens sapiens as a species.