摘要：Historical comparative linguistics is a useful tool for classification of human populations, due to the fact that the mother language was learnt from one’s native population, and when the language is passed on through generations in different descendant populations, variations (mutations) were accumulated in different ways. The genetic material (DNA) follows the similar way as language. So the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of two populations must be speaking a language at certain time point, and having a certain range of genetic lineages. Here several reasons were listed why a molecular pedigree can be much more precisely calculated than using languages, especially when considering the time scale. An example illustrates the potential application of molecular pedigree for divergence of Sino-Tibetan populations. Also the cases when molecular pedigree does not accord to the linguistic pedigree were discussed
