The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, an

The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, and Latin was spoken around 4500 BCE in Ukraine. It's a linguistic equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. It isn't merely that we can't know what happened before that. It's that the proto language was in fact relatively recent.