[AprilArcus]

Unfortunately, Ruhlen, Greenberg, and Starostin's work relies on mass comparison and is neither rigorous nor noteworthy. Prefixing languages are rare and most have been suggested to be related to one another at some point on that basis alone, starting with Trombetti's unscientific speculation in the 1920s.

Ed Vajda brought rigor to the hypothesis in series of publications which established Dene-Yenesian through the comparative method starting in 2008 and continuing to the present. Nichols briefly and favorably reviews this bibliography in her paper. As a senior researcher in the field, she was one of Vajda's original advocates when his proposal made its splashy debut.