Agriculture and Language Dispersals: Limitations, Refinements, and an Andean Exception?

Among the grandest and most controversial proposals for a holistic, cross‐disciplinary prehistory for humanity is the hypothesis that it was the adoption of agriculture that lay behind the dispersals of the world’s greatest language families. Conspicuous by its absence from this debate, however, is one of humanity’s rare independent hearths of agriculture and pristine civilization development: the Central Andes. Here we look to this region’s little‐known language prehistory, particularly the initial expansions of its two major indigenous language families, Quechua and Aymara. We then set these linguistic scenarios alongside archaeological evidence on where, when, and how agriculture originated here. The different time depths of these processes appear to preclude any simplistic cause‐and‐effect relationship between the two. Yet we go on to identify significant idiosyncrasies in the origins and development of food production in the Andes, which call for a number of refinements to the basic agriculture–language dispersal hypothesis. These are framed within a generalizing principle able to reconcile the appealing explanatory power of the hypothesis at great time depths with a reining in of any claims to unique and universal applicability in more recent times. The Andean case ends up transformed—an exception that more proves the rule than refutes it.