(no subject)

So I'm reading this article in the NYT (yeah, they want registration, but it's free) about genetic studies on the population of England, Scotland, and Ireland. There was a post about the article in medievalstudies, which made me already a little skeptical. In the article, there's a claim that the original inhabitants of the British Isles spoke a language related to Basque, made by a medical geneticist. Which... what? Then, there's this: "Dr. Oppenheimer’s population history of the British Isles relies not only on genetic data but also on the dating of language changes by methods developed by geneticists." Really, geneticists have methods of dating language changes? Sounds rather outside geneticists' area of expertise to me. What language a person or group of people speaks is not dependent on genes, much less the way that languages change. Languages don't exactly change the same way genes do, so I don't see how you could use the same statistical analyses on languages as on genes.

Edit: Posting text of article behind cut, since it will eventually go behind the Times Select archive wall.
( English, Irish, Scots: They're All One, Genes Suggest )