Other branches sometimes included are the Kartvelian and Dravidian families, as proposed by Pagel et al., in addition to the language isolates Nivkh, Etruscan and Greenberg's "Korean–Japanese–Ainu".

Linguists worldwide reject Eurasiatic and many other macrofamily hypotheses such as Nostratic, with the exception of Dené–Yeniseian languages, which has been met with some degree of acceptance.

The primary criticism of comparative methods is that cognates are assumed to have a common origin on the basis of similar sounds and word meanings.

It is generally assumed that semantic and phonetic corruption destroys any trace of original sound and meaning within 5,000 to 9,000 years making the application of comparative methods to ancient superfamilies highly questionable.

[8] Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin, who, unlike many of their colleagues, do not stipulate a priori that attempts to find ancient relationships are bound to fail, examined Greenberg's claims in detail.

[11][12] In 2013, Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade published statistical evidence that attempts to overcome these objections.

Drawing from research in a diverse group of modern languages, the authors were able to show the same slow replacement rates for key words regardless of current pronunciation.

They conclude that a stable core of largely unchanging words is a common feature of all human discourse, and model replacement as inversely proportional to usage frequency.

The distribution of cognate class size was positively skewed − many more small groups than large ones − as predicted by their hypothesis of variant decay rates.

[16] The team then created a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to estimate and date the phylogenetic trees of the seven language families under examination.

[18] Writing on University of Pennsylvania blog Language Log, Sarah Thomason questions the accuracy of the LWED data on which the paper was based.

[20] Thomason also argues that since the LWED is contributed to primarily by believers in Nostratic, a proposed superfamily even broader than Eurasiatic, the data is likely to be biased towards proto-words that can be judged cognate.

She also states that the authors are "looking in the wrong place" to begin with since "grammatical properties are more reliable than words as indicators of familial relationships".

This is deemed unlikely because of the large geographical area covered by the language groups and because frequently-used words are the least likely to be borrowed in modern times.

He states that "the Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 years ago) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap".

Greenberg enumerates eight branches of Eurasiatic, as follows: Altaic [Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic], Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo–Aleut, Etruscan, Indo-European, "Korean-Japanese-Ainu", Nivkh, and Uralic–Yukaghir.

[28] Regardless of version, these lists cover the languages spoken in most of Europe, Central and Northern Asia and (in the case of Eskimo-Aleut) on either side of the Bering Strait.

The branching of Eurasiatic is roughly (following Greenberg): A computational phylogenetic analysis by Jäger (2015) provided the following phylogeny of language families in Eurasia:[29] Yeniseian Dravidian Nakh-Daghestanian Austroasiatic Japonic Ainu Sino-Tibetan Hmong-Mien Austronesian Tai-Kadai Tungusic Mongolic Turkic Yukaghir Nivkh Uralic Chukotko-Kamchatkan Indo-European

[33] The last common ancestor of the family[vague] was estimated by phylogenetic analysis of ultraconserved words at roughly 15,000 years old, suggesting that these languages spread from a "refuge" area at the Last Glacial Maximum.