And lo, when he drew trees that tracked the evolutionary relationships between all the RecAs and all the RpoBs found on the cruise, he discovered parts of the trees that did not fit with the pattern established by known versions of these genes in the public genetic databases.

ECONOMIST: A new domain of life

"Once we have those trees we look at distribution of these different word order features over the descendant languages, and build evolutionary models for what's most likely to produce the diversity that we observe in the world, " Dr Dunn said.

BBC: Language universality idea tested with biology method