Comparative linguistics and the construction of a linguistic genealogical classification are very important for understanding the issues of ethnogenesis (the origin of peoples). In addition to anthropologists, ethnographers and linguists, scientists of many other specialties participate in the development of these problems, including historians studying written monuments, geographers and archaeologists, whose subject of research is the remnants of the economic and cultural activities of ancient peoples.
"During the Late or Upper Paleolithic (ancient Stone Age), which lasted several tens of thousands of years and ended about 16-15 millennia ago, modern humans have already firmly mastered a significant part of Asia (with the exception of the far north and high-altitude areas), all of Africa and almost all of Europe, except for the northern areas, still covered then glaciers. In the same era, Australia was settled from Indonesia, as well as America, where the first people penetrated from Northeast Asia through the Bering Strait, previously there was an isthmus in its place, there is also evidence that South America was inhabited from Antarctica, previously there could also be islands or narrow island isthmuses. According to the hypothesis of "primitive linguistic continuity" proposed by the Soviet ethnographer S. P. According to Tolstoy, mankind spoke at the dawn of its history in numerous languages, apparently gradually passing into one another in adjacent territories and forming as a whole a single continuous network ("linguistic continuity")" (Tikhomirov A.E., Collection of articles 2015, "PoLyART", Orenburg, 2016, pp. 18-19).
An indirect confirmation of S. P. Tolstov's hypothesis is that traces of ancient linguistic fragmentation in some countries persisted until recently. In Australia, for example, there were several hundred languages between which it was not easy to draw clear boundaries. N. N. Miklukho-Maklay noted that among the Papuans of New Guinea, almost every village had its own special language. The differences between the languages of the neighboring Papuan groups were very small. However, the languages of more distant groups have already become significantly different from each other. Tolstov believes that language families could have formed in the process of gradual concentration of individual languages of small collectives, their consolidation into larger groups that inhabited significant areas of the globe. Other Soviet and foreign linguists suggest that language families usually arose in the process of independent separation of one basic language during the settlement of its speakers or in the process of assimilation during its interaction with other languages, which led to the formation of local dialects within the basic language, which could later become independent languages.