"This is essentially the conclusion of biologists who treated the spread of language like the spread of disease. They specifically only modeled slow expansion through cultural diffusion, meaning they completely ignored things like languages spread through conquest. They literally ignored the Roman empire in the evolution of Indo European. So if you look at the actual timeline their simulation puts forth, it has things like Iceland being populated by settlers from the Faroe Islands, who took fifty years to cross the sea there. They also did much of this on the basis of cognates, and so by their model Russian splits off of the slavic languages first and Polish is closely related to Ukrainian, because Russian has a bunch of Greek words that make it seem superficially different.
Overall, it's not good science."
The poster also recommends a video that breaks this apart in greater detail, though it's over an hour long:
http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuro...
"This is essentially the conclusion of biologists who treated the spread of language like the spread of disease. They specifically only modeled slow expansion through cultural diffusion, meaning they completely ignored things like languages spread through conquest. They literally ignored the Roman empire in the evolution of Indo European. So if you look at the actual timeline their simulation puts forth, it has things like Iceland being populated by settlers from the Faroe Islands, who took fifty years to cross the sea there. They also did much of this on the basis of cognates, and so by their model Russian splits off of the slavic languages first and Polish is closely related to Ukrainian, because Russian has a bunch of Greek words that make it seem superficially different.
Overall, it's not good science."
The poster also recommends a video that breaks this apart in greater detail, though it's over an hour long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ