Linguistic Super-Family

In a study Professor of Evolutionary Biology Mark Pagel and his team used statistical methods to show that certain words have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to 10,000 or more years. These words, they say, point to the existence of a linguistic super-family tree from which the seven major language families of Eurasia (Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut) have evolved.