High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Statistical methods have been used in comparative linguistics since at least the 1950s (see Swadesh list). Since about the year 2000, there has been a renewed interest in the topic, based on the application of methods of computational phylogenetics and cladistics to define an optimal tree (or network) to represent a hypothesis about the evolutionary ancestry and perhaps its language contacts. The probability of relatedness of languages can be quantified and sometimes the proto-languages can be approximately dated. The topic came the attention of the popular press in 2003 after the publication of a short study on Indo-European in Nature (Gray and Atkinson 2003). A volume of articles on Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages was published in 2006 as the result of a conference held in Cambridge in 2004.