To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree: the Bantulanguages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific.
Central to the cultural space of Palenque de San Basilio is the palenquero language, the only creole language in Latin America with a lexical Spanish basis and grammatical characteristics of Bantulanguages.
Around a third of the vocabulary differences between modern Bantu speakers arose this way, around a fifth of the differences between speakers of Indo-European languages, and around a tenth of the Austronesians.