interpretation, Nichols suggests a relatively early date (pre-Clovis) for the initial peopling of the Americas. Nichols also suggests that change over time in head-marking languages tends to destroy the information needed for the comparative method of reconstructing a protolanguage that is the ancestor to a number of known languages, while dependent-marking languages are more likely to preserve it over time. This would help account for the large number of language families in the Americas and Australasia that are still considered independent, in contrast to the large families of considerable time depth that have been reconstructed in Eurasia and Africa. References 1992 non-fiction books Human migration Leonard Bloomfield Book Award books