Imagine being able to travel back thousands of years, not with a time machine, but through the words our ancestors spoke. It ...

Hunting the origin of 40 per cent of the languages spoken today is a huge feat, but Laura Spinney's new book makes an ...

Last Word is New Scientist’s long-running series in which readers give scientific answers to each other’s questions, ranging ...

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney is an exploration of how hundreds of languages share a single ...

Comparison of words for biological species from languages of the same language family facilitates reconstruction of the biological vocabulary of the family’s ancient proto-language. This study uses ...

Spinney tells the epic and fascinating story of how one ancient language – Proto-Indian-European – went global; its offspring languages are now spoken by disparate cultures from Scotland to China.

developed significance for different prehistoric groups of Native America. Dates and locations of proto-languages for which maize terms reconstruct generally accord with crop-origin and dispersal ...