Is Greenberg’s 'Macro-Carib' viable?

In his landmark work Language in the Americas, Greenberg (1987) proposed that Macro-Carib was one of the major low-level stocks of South America, which together with Macro-Panoan and Macro-Ge-Bororo were claimed to comprise the putative Ge-Pano-Carib Phylum. His Macro-Carib includes the isolates Andoke and Kukura, and the Witotoan, Peba-Yaguan, and Cariban families. Greenberg’s primary evidence came from person-marking paradigms in individual languages, plus scattered words from individual languages collected into 79 Macro-Carib ‘etymologies’ and another 64 Amerind ‘etymologies’. The goal of this paper is to re-evaluate Greenberg’s Macro-Carib claim in the light of the much more extensive and reliable language data that has become available largely since 1987. Based on full person-marking paradigms for Proto-Cariban, Yagua, Bora and Andoke, we conclude that Greenberg’s morphological claims are unfounded. For our lexical comparison, we created lexical lists for Proto-Cariban, Proto-Witotoan, Yagua and Andoke, for both Greenberg’s 143 putative etymologies and for the Swadesh 100 list. From both lists, a total of 23 potential cognates were found, but no consonantal correspondences were repeated even once. We conclude that our greatly expanded and improved database does not provide sufficient evidence to convince the skeptic that the Macro-Carib hypothesis is viable.