Proto

Spinney tackles the Proto-Indo-European puzzle, how a single Bronze Age tongue seeded most of the languages from Ireland to India, synthesizing linguistics, archaeology, and genetics for a general audience. Reviewers with linguistics backgrounds have pushed back on specific calls she makes, including her treatment of the Mitanni and Sanskrit material, and on her tendency to commit to one theory of Indo-European origins (the steppe/Kurgan hypothesis) rather than giving fair weight to rivals. As pure narrative science writing, though, it moves briskly and makes a genuinely difficult, jargon-heavy field legible without dumbing it down entirely.