NOSTRATIC

At the forefront of developments in linguistics is the steady march of "Nostratic", defined by Aaron Dolgopolsky as "a hypothetical macro-family of languages, embracing Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic and Dravidian."
The hypothesis is based on a "large number of common roots and
many common graphical morphemes...."
(The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 5, p. 2838, Oxford, N.Y. Seoul, Tokyo: Pergamon Press), quoted in the Great Nostratic Debate between Allan R. Bomhard and Alexis Manaster Ramer.

Essentially, there is an increasing recognition
that many of the languages of the world are related and that - subsequently - many of the cultures of the ancient world are thus also related in origin.

This is a tremendous blow to the unfounded elitism and insularity sometimes found in mainstream linguistics, Egyptology, Ancient Near East studies, Sumerology and Archaeology. These have lived and profited well over the centuries by continuously and effectively isolating their own areas of academic research and intentionally hampering progress. The recent Maya scandal involving Knorosow is just one more example of the general trend. 

THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES ARE
OVERTAKING THE HUMANITIES

The second revolution is taking place in the assessment of ancient
cultures by the physical and related sciences.

Since the inception of writing in the Western world, the study of
ancient cultures has primarily been the exclusive domain of the humanities - which have done excellent work, but who have stubbornly refused to take the evidence of the physical sciences into account to check their own work - especially since the physical sciences often have provided results contrary to those found published in what turn out to be merely scholarly academic opinion.