Reconstructing History: Using Language to Estimate Religious Spread
提出一种数据驱动方法，利用语言数据估计宗教传播的地理起源，验证了伊斯兰教和佛教的起源，并应用于基督教、犹太教和印度教的争议案例。
We introduce a data-driven approach to use language to reconstruct history, and apply the methodology to estimate the geographic origins of religious spread. To validate the approach, we use language data to estimate origins of Islam and Buddhism to within 500km of their true (and uncontested) origins. We then apply the methodology to the more complex (and contested) cases of Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. We show that language-based estimates, in these cases, are significantly more aligned with the origin of scripture than with the origin of the religion.