A New York Times article from 1995 presents a well-balanced
Most linguists agree that our methods for reconstruction will take as only
as far back as about 5000 - 7000 years; after that, the number of cognate
sets available for reconstruction becomes just too low to give results that
can be reliably distinguished from chance relationships. Although it would
be very satisfying to be able to link up some of the existing families at
a higher level, the evidence seems too weak to allow us to do so. A minority
of scholars, however, argue that this is possible, and one particularly
well-known group of such scholars goes by the name of Nostraticists, derived
from their views that there exists a super-family of language they have
called the "Nostratic". A New York Times article from 1995 presents a well-balanced
view of the Nostraticist position. Dr. Donald Ringe of the Penn Linguistics Department, himself an expert
on the ancient Indo-European language Tocharian, is one of the chief critics
of the Nostraticist position.