"One overall judgement emerges from this survey of how historical linguists have traditionally sought to set language (pre)histories into real-world contexts: all our traditional techniques and models are less reliable than the discipline has long liked to believe.... The same technique can be open to opposing interpretations, and different techniques often contradict each other on the same language family. Convincing ‘proof’ is hard to come by indeed.... Linguistics alone cannot come to the most plausible overall scenario for the prehistory of the populations involved. That can be assessed only in the light of the archaeological and genetic records, and the cause-and-effect relationship that links them all.... Those other disciplines continue to make spectacular leaps forward, and in historical linguistics itself, dropping the mask of many ‘old certainties’ only throws open the potential for great advances towards a sounder, truly cross- disciplinary understanding of prehistory.... Even for the world’s largest language families, that synthesis still has far to run. For language convergence areas and diversity hotspots, we have barely even begun to unlock the cross-disciplinary potential, so as to round out the rich tale that our languages can tell us of our past."