The Origins of Language, and How It Shaped Our World

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Laura Spinney
Bloomsbury Publishing (2025)

Six thousand years ago, a small group of herders near the Black Sea had a word for “excrement”: kakka. They also had a word for “filth”: puH, pronounced “poo” with a kind of huff at the end.

No one ever wrote down those words, and the herders’ language is dead. But for 6,000 years, people speaking the descendants of the herders’ language have used those unpleasant words (or variants of them) for feces and rot.

We now call the herders’ language “Proto-Indo-European,” the first of an immense family of languages now spoken by half the people on the planet.

Laura Spinney, a British science journalist who wrote an excellent book on the global impact of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, has now published a fascinating account of how a language spoken by a few hundred herders near the Black Sea became multiple families of languages spoken by half the world’s people.

But it’s not really about the language as such. The brilliance of Spinney’s writing is that she uses the story of the herders’ language, Proto-Indo-European, and its daughter languages, as a vehicle to uncover the turbulent history of the late Stone Age and the Bronze Age that succeeded it. We begin to understand that prehistoric peoples were not just hairy barbarians, but sophisticated technologists sustaining complex societies.

Combined with archeology and the new science of archaic DNA analysis, early language families let us glimpse a world far older than the Greeks and Persians we think of as “ancient.”

By definition, prehistory deals with events and peoples before the invention of writing. But we are beginning to understand much more about the very ancient world thanks to advances in three sciences: linguistics, archeology and DNA analysis.

Linguistics, working on sound shifts, has given us about 1,600 words in Proto-Indo-European, which no one has spoken in over 5,000 years. Archeology has identified cultures and their movements across Eurasia in the centuries that followed. DNA analysis has told us what the peoples of those cultures were like, and who intermarried with whom.

Five thousand to 10,000 years ago, the peoples of Eurasia included hunter-gatherers, herders and farmers. Many lived on the steppe — a vast territory of grasses and shrubs that extends from eastern Europe to Manchuria.

On the move across the steppe

Almost everyone on the steppe was on the move. Hunter-gatherers pursued game; herders led their sheep and goats from pasture to pasture; farmers moved across the unfarmable steppe in search of new land to support their growing numbers.

About 6,500 years ago, technological change made a sudden impact on the world, comparable to the invention of the steam engine long after: people on both sides of the Ural Mountains, a north-south range that spans most of Russia from the Arctic Ocean to northwestern Kazakhstan, domesticated horses. Those on the east side of the Urals developed the breed that would eventually carry people from Mongolia in the east all the way to Poland in the west. On the west side, another horse breed was first herded and then ridden.

On both sides of the Urals, people suddenly had access to horsepower, energy to carry them long distances, while also providing meat and milk. Spinney makes it clear that riding horses was a relatively late development, but it was adopted so quickly around the Black Sea that it’s hard to say who the first horse riders were.

Among the early adopters west of the Urals were a herding people we now call the Yamnaya — a Russian word for “pit grave,” which was a common practice among this particular group.

The Yamnaya were also imaginative users of livestock: being lactose intolerant, they didn’t drink milk from horses or sheep but converted it into cheese and yogurt. They also knew how to mine copper, smelt it and forge it into tools and weapons, and they dramatically improved their mobility by building wagons and hitching them to oxen.

That, Spinney tells us, opened up the whole steppe to the Yamnaya. Instead of staying in the region between the Dnieper and the Don rivers, where their oldest genomes are found, they could move their herds and households anywhere they liked. And by exploiting the nutrients of the steppe more efficiently than anyone before them, they prospered.

“Their bones and teeth testify to this,” Spinney explains. “They grew significantly taller and stronger than their ancestors. Some of them were remarkably long-lived. Archeologists have retrieved sexagenarians, even septuagenarians. And very soon, there were a great many more of them: a veritable population explosion.”

The Yamnaya looked much like modern Europeans. DNA analysis showed them to be unusually tall at 180 centimetres (six feet), brown-eyed, brown-haired and with fair to dark complexions.

But such analysis also shows that at the time, they were one of four peoples living around the Black Sea, each as different in appearance from the others as modern Europeans are from modern Chinese.

As they expanded their range, the Yamnaya met other peoples and started new families with them; their appearance must have changed just as their languages did.

The mummies of the Taklamakan

Spinney cites another example, the mummies of northwest China, on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Well preserved in dry desert soil, they are the remains of hundreds of tall, fair-haired men and women with pale skin, prominent noses and deep-set eyes. Their clothing was woven in tartan patterns, much like those of the Celtic speakers far to the west.

Archeologists assumed the mummies were Tocharians, an Indo-European people who migrated far to the east many centuries after the Yamnaya.

“In 2021,” Spinney writes, “scientists from China and Germany put the speculation to rest. Having analyzed the genomes of 13 of the oldest mummies, they reported that those individuals were a genetic vestige of the hunter-gatherers who had inhabited the eastern end of Eurasia since before the last ice age. They had not interbred with any of the populations around them.... If they looked European, it was more likely to be because their ancestors had bequeathed genes shaping skin and hair colour to ancient Europeans, than because Europeans had come east.”

The Yamnaya spread out for centuries to the north, east, west and south. In the process they picked up words and customs from other peoples.

Spinney notes that Proto-Indo-European and its sister language, Proto-Anatolian, have completely different words for “wheel.” That suggests that their speakers encountered wheels only after Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Anatolian split from an earlier language.

An ancient word for ‘river’

Some words in Proto-Indo-European’s daughter languages have persisted. For example, the Scythians, a people who spoke Indo-European languages associated with what is now known as Iran, once lived in what is now southern Ukraine. “Donbas” is a contraction of “Donets River Coal Basin,” and “Donets” is a Slavic word meaning “small river.” “Don” comes from the Iranic word danu, meaning “river.” The same word is part of other Ukrainian river names like Dnieper (“river to the rear”) and Dniester (“river to the front”) — not to mention the Don itself as well as the Danube.

All those rivers, Spinney tells us, were named by the Scythians 3,000 years ago. Other peoples now battle to control the region, but they still use the Scythian words for its rivers.

We tend to dismiss preliterate peoples as somehow not as “advanced” as we are. This is a mistake. The Yamnaya and other Bronze Age peoples were just as smart as we are, if not smarter. They could mine and smelt copper ore, alloy the copper with arsenic or tin, and forge bronze tools and weapons. And they could teach their children all those skills. That must have required precise terms, clear arguments and attentive listeners who could act on instructions.

The same applies to their herding and wagon-building skills, which made them masters of the steppe. As Yamnaya groups separated from one another, their languages changed — but their technologies, and the stories they told, the myths and legends, stayed the same.

Spinney tells us: “From the Scottish isles to the Himalaya, there existed a chain of societies that was deeply interconnected through trade, custom, language and mythology.”

DNA analysis shows that the first Yamnaya men were closely related on their fathers’ side. They were part of a hierarchical, patriarchal society, and they seem to have replaced many of the peoples in Europe. It was probably not a genocide, Spinney suggests, but the consequences of a western European pandemic of bubonic plague.

The Yamnaya would have moved west into an almost empty land. Indo-European languages kept spreading, and the plague survivors would have adopted the newcomers’ languages. In Europe today, only the Basques still speak a language spoken before the pandemic.

When writing finally reached the Indo-Europeans, it was through trade with the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, and then with the alphabet-inventing Phoenicians. But it was a slow, uneven process. Many Indo-European societies revered the bards who could recite from memory the histories of great kings and queens, wars won and lost. Only a tiny fraction of their epic songs, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, were preserved.

The Indo-European languages’ power of storytelling may have helped them spread around the world, inspiring each generation to emulate the heroes of the past. In her plain but fluent English, Spinney evokes the epic triumphs and tragedies of those whose names have not been spoken for millennia.