This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. Every so often, I’m reminded of a truly startling fact. It ...

A new book by Laura Spinney is rather tantalisingly called Proto, begging the question: proto-what? Prototype, the earliest version of a technology? Protoplasm, the stuff of our cells? Or even ...

A new linguistic study sheds light on the nature of languages spoken before the written period, using computational modeling to reconstruct the grammar of the 6500-7000 year-old Proto-Indo-European ...

Ever since eighteenth-century scholars recognized that Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit all descended from a common language, researchers have been consumed with determining who first spoke this ancient ...

Where lies the origin of the Indo-European language family? Researchers contribute a new piece to this puzzle. They analyzed ancient DNA from 435 individuals from archaeological sites across Eurasia ...

Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, ...

“If the Proto-Indo-Europeans had words for axles and wagons, it tells us something about when and where they lived,” he added. By reconstructing these words, researchers were able to find the presence ...

In summer 2022, a linguist mentioned the origin story of the Indo-European languages and how research in the field was racing ahead. I was intrigued because, in the last 10 years, we’ve been able to ...

Among the great intellectual developments of the nineteenth century was the advent of the comparative method in the nascent field of linguistics. Among the great intellectual developments of the early ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a ...