Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's a

Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's an active area of debate now too with a lot of cross pollination between biology and linguistics. A good recent summary of the issues is Jacques and List 2019 which is available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/CONTENT/content https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/C... The authors' application to historical linguistics of the concept of incomplete lineage sorting from population genetics I think is particularly cool