cause of the apparent cognates. Thomason says she is "unqualified" to comment on the statistics themselves, but says any model that uses bad data as input cannot provide reliable results. Asya Pereltsvaig takes a different approach to her critique of the paper. Outlining the history (in English) of several of the words on the Pagel list, she concludes it is impossible that such words could have retained any sound and meaning pairings from 15,000 years ago given how much they have changed in the 1,500 or so year attested history of English. She also states that the authors are "looking in the wrong place" to begin with since "grammatical properties are more reliable than words as indicators of familial relationships". Pagel et al. also examined two other possible objections to their conclusions. They rule out linguistic borrowing as a significant factor in the results on the basis that for a word to appear cognate in many language families solely because of borrowing would require frequent swapping back and forth. This is deemed unlikely because of the large geographical area covered by the language groups and because frequently used words are the least likely to be borrowed in modern times. Finally, they state that leaving aside closed class words with simple phonologies (e.g. I and we) does not affect their conclusions. Classification According to Greenberg, the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He states that "the Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 years ago) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap". In contrast, "Eurasiatic-Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings". Like Eurasiatic, Amerind is not a generally accepted proposal. Eurasiatic and another proposed macrofamily, Nostratic, often include many of the same language families. Vladislav Illich-Svitych's Nostratic dictionary did not include the smaller Siberian language families listed in Eurasiatic, but this was only because protolanguages had not been reconstructed for them; Nostraticists have not attempted to exclude these languages from Nostratic. Many Nostratic theorists have accepted Eurasiatic as a subgroup within Nostratic alongside Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian. LWED likewise views Eurasiatic as a subfamily of Nostratic. The Nostratic family is not endorsed by the mainstream of comparative linguistics. Harold C. Fleming includes Eurasiatic as a subgroup of the hypothetical Borean family. Subdivisions The