During my attendance at the ‘Transeurasian Millets and Beans, Words and Genes’ conference in Jena (January 2019), Martine Robbeets invited me to comment on the articles that are published in this Special Collection in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences. My comments are focused on the seven articles that deal with the ‘Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis’, one of the key theoretical constructs discussed during the conference. I consider how the hypothesis might aid an understanding of the prehistory and early history of the Transeurasian language family.

Archaeolinguistics, a field which combines language reconstruction and archaeology as a source of information on human prehistory, has much to offer to deepen our understanding of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Northeast Asia. So far, integrated comparative analyses of words and tools for textile production are completely lacking for the Northeast Asian Neolithic and Bronze Age. To remedy this situation, here we integrate linguistic and archaeological evidence of textile production, with the aim of shedding light on ancient population movements in Northeast China, the Russian Far East, Korea and Japan. We show that the transition to more sophisticated textile technology in these regions can be associated not only with the adoption of millet agriculture but also with the spread of the languages of the so-called ‘Transeurasian’ family. In this way, our research provides indirect support for the Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis, which posits that language expansion from the Neolithic onwards was often associated with agricultural colonization.