A New Method for Computational Cladistics: An Afro‐Asiatic Case Study

Abstract This paper makes two contributions. First, we introduce a new method for computational cladistics that produces a rooted tree by minimising the number of homoplasies. This method is compared with lexicostatistics and maximum parsimony. We validate the method on Indo‐European data and show that the tree derived is consistent with current understanding of the internal cladistics of that family. Secondly, we turn the method to treat the less well studied problem of the internal cladistics of Afro‐Asiatic. We show that there is good evidence for a North/South division in Afro‐Asiatic with Berber, Egyptian and Semitic in the North and Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic in the South. There is also tentative evidence for further grouping of Egyptian with Semitic and Cushitic with Omotic.