THE Washington Post reports today that linguists have discovered a handful of "ultraconserved" words, some 15,000 years old. These are said to include "hand", "give", "bark" and "ash". The paper is ...

Imagine the wealth of knowledge we could uncover if it was possible to travel back in time and re-construct ancient languages. While that’s impossible right now, scientists at UC Berkley and the ...

A new linguistic study sheds light on the nature of languages spoken before the written period, using computational modeling to reconstruct the grammar of the 6500-7000 year-old Proto-Indo-European ...

Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of ...

Africa is humankind’s home continent. Homo sapiens, with the anatomical and cognitive capacity to have human language as we know it today, originated in Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Archaeologists discovered a basalt tablet about the size of a piece of paper bearing 60 unknown script characters expertly ...