Proto-Indo-European
A language spoken on the steppe becomes the ancestor of half the world's speakers.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.2 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Comparative linguistics reconstructs a single ancestral language behind Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and Baltic families and more. The reconstructed vocabulary includes wheels, wagons, wool and horses, which dates it after those existed, and the steppe hypothesis places its speakers north of the Black and Caspian Seas in the fourth millennium BCE. Ancient DNA has since confirmed a large migration from exactly there into Europe and South Asia.