Here's the details of Gell-Mann's viewpoint on this theory in an interview he gave with ScienceNews:
“The thing I’m most excited about is in linguistics. For some reason in this country and in Western Europe, most tenured professors of historical and comparative linguistics hate the idea of distant relationships among human languages, or at least the idea that those can be demonstrated. And they set up extraordinary barriers to doing so, by making anyone who thinks that languages are related, what they call ‘genetically related’ in linguistics — it has nothing to do with biological genetics — in other words, one language descended from another and so on, so you get a sort of tree. They put a tremendous burden of proof on anyone who wants to say that languages are related in this way, by this common descent. And in that way I believe they are throwing away a huge body of very interesting and convincing evidence. And sometimes they come up with pseudomathematical arguments for throwing away these relationships. It’s all a matter of putting a huge burden of proof on anyone who wants to say the two things are related. If you can, find some ‘squeeze’ out of it by some kind of far-fetched explanation involving chance or the borrowing of words or the borrowing of grammatical particles, so-called morphemes. If you can find some outlandish explanation involving chance and borrowing, then you throw out the idea of genetic relationship and so on.…
But the evidence is actually pretty convincing for quite distant relationships. And in this collaboration between our group at the Santa Fe Institute and the group in Moscow, both consisting mostly of Russian linguists — because in Russia these ideas are not considered crazy — in that collaboration we seem to be finding more and more evidence that might point ultimately to the following rather interesting proposition: that a very large fraction of the world’s languages, although probably not all, are descended from one spoken quite recently…, something like 15 to 20,000 years ago. Now it’s very hard to believe that the first human language, modern human language, goes back only that far. For example, 45,000 years ago we can already see cave paintings in Western Europe and engravings and statues and dance steps in the clay of the caves in Western Europe, and we can see some quite interesting advanced developments in southern Africa that are even earlier, like 70 or 75,000 years ago or something like that. It’s very difficult for some of us to believe that human language doesn’t go back at least that far. So I don’t think that we’re talking about the origin of human language — I would guess that that’s much older. But what we’re talking about is what you can call a bottleneck effect, very familiar in linguistics….
And we see that with Indo-European, which spread widely over such a tremendous area; we see it with Bantu, which spread over a big fraction of the southern two-thirds of Africa. We see it with the spread of Australian. The Australian languages seem to be related to one another. Although there were people in Australia 45,000 years ago, it doesn’t look as if the ancestral language of the Australian languages could go back more than 10 or 12,000 years, maybe even considerably less. So there was a huge spread also. I personally suspect that it was some group from a certain area in New Guinea that we can point to that gave the language ancestral to the Australian languages. Communication between Australia and New Guinea was easier then.
Anyway, since these things are so common in history, in the history of language, why not believe that a big fraction of the world’s languages all go back to a single one, relatively recently? Anyway, we’re accumulating more and more and more evidence. Eventually I think everybody will be convinced that these relationships really exist.
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