Proto

282 pages text/illustration, 22 pages bibliography, 21 pages end notes, 16 pages index
- the index is essential though incomplete; Spinney reintroduces nouns and placenames 200 pages after a first appearance
This book is about the evolution of language and the migration of languages/cultures

p4-5 The Peak of the Last Ice Age, 20 KY ago, Mercator 75W to "195E", 70S to 80N
- ice sheets, lower sea level, land bridges Asia to North America, Europe to Britain/Island
p33-34 Lingua Obscura, undated, 31E to 40E, 20N to 49N
p60-61 Proto-Indo-European, undated, 9W to 88E, 8N to 64N, migration of Yamnaya to Britain, Spain, Denmark, India, Altai mountains though the Eurasian Steppe
p90-91 Anatolian, undated, 4E to 41E, 32N to 42N
p118-119 Tocharian, undated, 66E to 97E, ? ?
p142-143 Celtic, Germanic, and Italic, 500BC
p180-181 Indo-Iranian
p210-211 Baltic and Slavic
p234-235 Albanian, Armenian, Greek
p256-257 The Indo-European Speaking-World Today almost everywhere besides Africa, Arabia, Mongolia, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia

p07 5kya, Proto-Indo-European "exploded out of Black Sea cradle" eastward westward, Ireland to India
p09 300kya, Homo sapiens arose in Africa, vocal tracts, cognition
p09 60kya, Homo sapiens walked out of Africa with tools and speech
p10 14kya, glaciers recede
p10 human population 10M, 10k spoken languages, ~1k each
p10 vertical bilingualism people higher up with their own language also learn the language lower down, perhaps for marketing (reason not mentioned by Spinney)
p11 Official languages grew, 1M speakers 5kya
p12 writing emerged 6000 YA, confusing 30 minutes to midnight clock analogy
p13 Dante Divine Comedy Tuscan dialect became standard literary language of western Europe for 200 years
p18 Enlightenment scholars searched for non-biblical birthplace of Indo-European
p19 Max Weinrich 1894-1969 A language is a dialect with an army and a navy
p20 dead languages studied with linguistics, archaeology and genetics
p22 Jacob Grimm Grimm's Law word sound in one language predicably changes to a different sound in another language
p28 cheap/fast DNA sequencing major expansion of unwritten history
p29 anthropologist James C. Scott called infectious disease the 'loudest silence' in the archaeological record
p29 Scythian is pronounced SI-thee-uhn
p37
p39
p40
p41
p41