How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story is its starting point, specifically, determining where it was. He hopes ...

In “Proto,” Laura Spinney details the centurieslong effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from ...

Around half of the world’s population speaks a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. ... Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. By Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury; 352 pages; $29.99.

How did the language you are reading come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian ...

The reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Indo-European has only about 1,600 words, and at its dawn the language may have been spoken by as few as 100 people—people who didn’t need words for such ...

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury, $29.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-63973-258-6 ...

Indo-European languages spoken by nearly half of the world today originated from an ancient population that lived in the North Caucasus mountains and the Lower Volga, according to a new DNA study ...

Laura Spinney’s “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” explores the roots of language and how it spread and changed across time and place.

Among the arresting things that Reich et al. argue is that we should speak of a precursor to Proto-Indo-European: Proto-Indo-Anatolian, which they believe split sometime between 4300 and 3500 B.C.

Harvard researchers traced the origins of the vast Indo-European language family to the Caucasus-Lower Volga region, identifying the ancestral population that gave rise to more than 400 languages ...

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others. By Carl Zimmer In 1786, a British judge named ...

Indo-European languages (IE), which number over 400 and include major groups such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic, are spoken by nearly half the world's population today.