Words in Motion - The Origins of Language
 

In Proto, Laura Spinney tells the epic tale of how one ancient language went global, and the scientific quest to trace it back to its roots. As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia, by the Black Sea. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family. How did this happen? Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.