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The Origin of Human Language Scientists are hot on the scent of the original human languages, and appear closer than ever to their quarry. One crucial question is who spread the oldest languages across the globe. Some scientists had focused on a Central Asian tribe of nomadic herders called the Kurgans, who domesticated horses 6,000 years ago and invaded Europe. Now there is another view. In December, biologist Russell Gray of Australia's Auckland University reported in the magazine Nature on his study of the Indo-European family of languages. Scientists have long noted that there are only a few hundred "core" words in many languages that can be related to similar words in other languages. Some core words in English, for example, include "star," "dog," "earth," "blood," "woman" and so on. In his study, Gray treated words like DNA to build an "evolutionary tree" of languages similar to those used in relating species by genetic code. Similar studies are increasingly used to track down the authorship of disputed works of great literature; Gray extended the technique much further. Gray's finding: language "spread not by the sword of conquest, but by the plough." As the English newspaper The Guardian, noted, Gray argues that words were on the move long before the Kurgan horses. Gray pinpoints the roots of Indo-European languages in Anatolia (now in modern Turkey) about 7500 B.C. There villagers speaking a form of Hittite started pahhur, or fire, to boil watar, or water, before setting out on pad, or foot. As the farmers spread their relatively-advanced agriculture, they also sowed the seeds of a universal language. 
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The
ELPAC Report