Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney, c. 2025.

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney, c. 2025. Bloomsbury Publishing.

This is where I first saw mention of this book: link here. The lede:

This is one of the three best books I read in 2025 (the others being Orbital and Playground).  As the title indicates, this book elucidates in extensive but clear detail how one early proto-language radiated from the area north of the Black Sea outward toward what is now Europe and southeast into what is now the Indian subcontinent.

An analysis like this requires more than just linguistic skills.  Understanding the processes involved requires familiarity also with the anthropology of the movements of people, their occupations, their trading networks, their social behaviors, and also an understanding of archaeological findings, including DNA extracted from ancient bones. The author, Laura Spinney, is not a professional linguist, anthropologist, or archaeologist.  Instead (and presumably for the better), she is a professional science writer, able to compress immense volumes of information into a form suitable for the general public.  After reading this book, I immediately placed a request at our library for her previous work - Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed The World.

Link here to interview with Laura Spinney. This interview was recorded in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. I would love to see Ms Spinney write a similar book on Covid-19. 

Influenza: