Today nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did that happen?

Ancient Europeans had a long tradition of oral storytelling before they had a written language, it turns out. Researchers from New University of Lisbon and Durham University have published new ...

From English and Russian to Bengali and Punjabi, billions of us around the world speak Indo-European languages. And in the same way that we all came from a common ancestor, all of these languages ...

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 ...

I want to reflect on four books that made a major impact on me in 2025; what all four share is a focus on the history of ...

Photo of Remontnoye (3766–3637 calBCE), with a spiral temple ring. Credit: Natalia Shishlina (co-author of "The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans") Photo of Remontnoye (3766–3637 calBCE), with a ...

Retracing every last twist in the path from there to here, no doubt, would make for a gripping book. However, that is not the book J. P. Mallory wrote. His sole concern in The Indo-Europeans ...

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 ...

MOTHER. There can scarcely be a more emotive word in the English language. We can imagine children howling it as they wake from nightmares, and centenarians whispering it on their death beds. A 2004 ...

5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya culture migrated into Europe from the Caspian steppe. In addition to innovations such as the wagon and dairy production, they brought a new language - Indo-European - that ...