What's actually fantastical about this paper (and maybe why it's written the way it is... more on that later) is that while they show clear correlation between bear genetics and Indigenous language groups, their analysis to try to determine what biophysical and geographical factors might be influencing these distributions came up basically blank. Once physical distance was removed, their remaining factors (terrain ruggedness, waterways, modern and ancient settlements, modern forestry, and language groups) could only explain a very small percentage of the distribution in bear populations.<p>So, on one hand, this is fantastic, since it plays into the whole notion that ecological systems (and how humans and human cultures interact with and shape ecological systems) are resistant to "straightforward" reductive analyses, which is very much in the spirit of this research.<p>On the other hand, it means this paper is kind of weird to write. Like it's a very enticing positive result (bear genetics and indigenous language groups are correlated), but basically empty handed in terms of explanation.<p>I've never written a real scientific paper, but plenty of engineering reports, and always found reports which are basically summarized to "here's ever measure and correlate we tried, and nothing is conclusive or explanatory" to be awful to write. Because you don't have a positive result to anchor onto, you're just... enumerating a bunch of stuff with no payoff.
This is a potentially cool article that I'm straining to read because of all the science-ese. Like this is some of the most dense, strained, and non-intuitive English I have read in a while -- and I have a background in science. I want to like the paper but I just hate this style of writing.<p>Anyway the punchline is:<p>> Grizzly bears sampled within an area represented by a given language family were significantly similar to those sampled within that language family (P = 0.001) and significantly divergent to those sampled outside the language family (P = 0.001). This spatial co-occurrence suggests that grizzly bear and human groups have been shaped by the landscape in similar ways, creating a convergence of grizzly bear genetic and human linguistic diversity.<p>What I guess they're saying is that they've found pockets in the landscape where languages had time to evolve (relatively unmixed with other languages) and bears had time to evolve (relatively unmixed with other bear species.)<p>Anyway, I don't want to take away from the hard work of these researchers, who for all I know are reading this comment thread. But I will say the way they have written the paper makes me not want to read beyond the abstract (I tried.) For the intrepid one who wants to break this paper down, I'd be curious to know how much more there is.