[AlotOfReading]

It's fairly normal scientific language to me, but it does have a somewhat unusual twist. The authors are saying precisely what they mean, not making semantic space for extrapolation. That can be confusing because my understanding is not that they "found pockets where languages had time to evolve independently", but rather both that the same factors influencing bear community formation were potentially influencing human community formation and deliberately leaving open the interpretation that bear/other animal geography directly influenced human geography.

All of that said, I don't personally find it an incredibly exciting paper. It's just an exploratory paper saying "here's a cool coincidence, someone should look more into this". Those are pretty abundant in any subject dealing with humans even if the underlying proposal seems plausible.