Could the word for mother prove that Turkey was the birthplace of hundreds of languages as diverse as Hindi, Russian, Dutch, Albanian, Italian and English?
Researchers using a complex computer model originally designed to map epidemics have traced the evolution of the Indo-European language family to find an answer in a study published on Tuesday in the journal, Science.
Similarities between hundreds of languages spoken from Iceland to India have led to hot debates over where they originated and what their spread and evolution can tell us about early humans.
The dominant theory is that the languages now spoken by some three billion people came from Bronze Age nomads who used horses and the wheel to spread east and west from the steppes north of the Caspian sea near what is now Ukraine around 5000 to 6000 years ago.
Others argue that it was agriculture - not the horse - that helped spread the language. They trace the origins to Turkey around 8000 to 9500 years ago.
This latest study used a massive database of common words - or cognates - both modern and ancient to trace the roots all the way back to Turkey.
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