It's funny how similar unrelated languages can be. It seems like, as much as there are mechanisms in place to drive languages apart with time, there's also mechanisms in place to bring them closer together. The more different groups communicate, the more similar their languages become (while at the same time distinct from how they used to be).
My instinct is to question how some apparently unrelated systems can come to mirror eachother nearly identically. Do entire pronominal systems, or even nominal declension systems get borrowed from one language to another? One look at Northeast Caucasian, and right away you'll see a system very similar to that of the IndoEuropean languages, but also the Uralic languages. Or maybe they developed independantly, can we know?
Go to the americas, and nearly the entirety of the two continents' languages have deeply embedded similarities. Some say there are 3 main groupings, but most of the "amerind" languages seem quite similar to the EskimoAluet and often the NaDene languages if analyzed in the same way individual Amerind languages were analyzed.
Are languages and their systems really that unanalyzeable and unreconstructible at vast time distances? What if there's enough surviving languages to build more data? I get that we may never take Burushaski and trace it back to some distant ancestor; being that it's just Burushaski and its many dialects that survive, kinda like Basque.....
But with the IndoEuropean languages, there are so many descendants, that we can reconstruct with a fair bit of confidence ProtoIndoEuropean and at least three major dialects, with hints at how it may have existed internally at a PreProtoIndoEuropean level! Quite astonishing, but probably only possible with the volume of data that exists for that family.
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