One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story. At the end of the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, exploded outwards until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen? Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. Along the steppe and the silk roads, we follow the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to discover this distant diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
