A new way of thinking

More than just trees: Historical linguists have traditionally tried to classify languages and language phyla into neatly branching trees. However, human geneticists have shown that human populations do not evolve in such a simplistic manner. Rather, modern populations are descended from various ancient components, some of which are "ghost" populations (populations that no longer exist as a single entity). Linguistics needs to take this approach too.

Open data: It is absolutely crucial to have open-access linguistic data if historical linguistics were to progress into the computationally-oriented 21st century. Hiding handwritten notes in old file cabinets is a bad habit that has to go.

The most mobile peoples tend to be most successful at establishing large language families that are existent today. They are not necessarily sedentary agricultural peoples; in fact, many of them spoke extinct isolate languages, including Sumerian, Etruscan, Elamite, Harappan, etc. The rise of agriculture has been over-emphasized in the beginnings of large language phya. Agriculture would later help these phyla to spread, but many of them did not start off due to agricultural dispersals. Some prime examples include Semitic (Afroasiatic) and Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan), which both originated from phyla that spread as a result of nomadic migrations from far elsewhere rather than agricultural dispersalls.