Advances in population genetics and language history: How large datasets and ancient DNA changed the picture

Since the development of genetic analysis for the study of population history, the discipline has been paired with linguistics to compare human demographic and cultural trajectories, focusing on targeted regional cases and a few global-scale studies. This chapter reviews advances in the field of genetics from the past two decades and focuses on different scales of resolution: technological improvements, geographic coverage, and time depth of data availability, with the study of modern and ancient DNA. To understand how these advances can integrate multidisciplinary studies of language history, this chapter illustrates possible scenarios which link the history of languages with the history of their speakers. Migration, contact, and isolation are some of the factors in play, which can also contribute to the degree of correspondence between genes and languages.