Humans Who Read Grammars

I was just thinking.. What if some isolates are old creoles?  If there are really old creoles around, would we not first classify them as isolates? Or as "really weird and simplified members" of their main lexifier's genealogical group? How would we know that they are old creoles if we don't have the sociohistorical context? I was talking to my friend Abbie Hantgan the other day, she's worked on an isolate language called Bangime [ bang1363, dba ] and we got to thinking. What if Bangime is an old Dogon lexified creole? What if this is true of more isolates? Very often we know about the existence of contact languages because we know the socio-historical context of their creation. But that type of knowledge doesn't go back that far, and there is no reason to assume that there weren't contact languages before that. So how do we recognise languages that are old creoles? If we didn't know better perhaps we've been classifying them as isolates...

I have a lot of thoughts and ideas but I always like to fact-check and double check before I say anything. I thought I'd share some of the stranger ones with you for the sake of entertainment. These are not serious thoughts, just strange thoughts. This one is one of the strangest and might fit better in an edition of  the Speculative Grammarian. What can we learn by comparing mature /complex language features and junk DNA  in biological organisms? I.e. something entities that have been around for a long time acquire and have a hard time to get rid of. Mature features or frills in languages can be things that take a long time to evolve and sometimes bleaches down so much that it barely has any function anymore, except to mark group membership. Complex features is a umbrella term for lots of things, they're not necessarily the same. I don't know a lot about Junk DNA/non-coding DNA, but I do know that you can get it from not deleting copies (bleaching..?) and retrovirus...