How many languages were there in Eurasia 12,000 years ago?

The time limit 12,000 years ago is really a watershed for the human species in Europe. Up to that point the population in Europe had been hunter-gatherers that had arrived in two waves 45,000 and 30,000 years ago. So whatever languages were spoken were the languages of those people. read more

Professor Pagel's previous research on the evolution of human languages has built up a picture of how our 7,000 living human languages have evolved - with the 'proto-Eurasiatic' language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people. read more

Cattle was domesticated there 1,000 years before the Middle East and India. read more