# #59: Laura Spinney - Proto: The Language that Runs Through Us

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-humans-work-podcast-1330381/59-laura-spinney-proto-the-language-that-runs-through-us.md
Podcast: [How Humans Work Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-humans-work-podcast-1330381)
Published: 2026-07-24T05:30:00+00:00
Episode link: HTTPS://howhumanswork.us/episodes
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/e611d7b5-7c1c-4f16-8bbb-d1d53a6bf0d3.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/how-humans-work-podcast-1330381/episodes/59-laura-spinney-proto-the-language-that-runs-through-us
Duration seconds: 3743

## Resource

Episode #59 Summary The delightful and engaging Laura Spinney is a science journalist and author of the book Proto . Laura joins the podcast to help us unpack the extraordinary story of the ancient Bronze Age Yamnaya culture, whose linguistic legacy endures today in the family of Indo-European languages. Even though the Yamnaya’s Proto language went extinct without being recorded, its linguistic offspring have survived across millennia, evolving into a multitude of other languages that are alive and well in our time. Some of these many languages are English, Urdu, Russian, Farsi, Bengali, Spanish, Norwegian, and Irish. Proto is also the mother tongue of other languages that have since become extinct, such as Latin, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek. With admirable mental dexterity, Laura weaves the complex, multilayered facets of the Proto story. She helps us tackle the core mystery of it all: who were the ancient peoples who spoke Proto that was never written down and hasn’t been uttered in more than 4,000 years, and how is it that their Pontic Steppe culture ended up being the progenitor to a set of languages that are now spoken around the planet? Armed with the most up-to-date insights from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics, Laura shows us how these disciplines have converged over the last two decades to provide an increasingly clearer, but still evolving portrait. By unearthing DNA, tracing word roots, and studying cultural remnants, science has modeled aspects of this prehistoric period and the Yamnaya peoples, providing a deeper glimpse into the linguistic origins of nearly half of the planet. This episode concludes by considering the contemporary lessons Proto's themes offer. Migrations, evolving linguistic and genetic demographics, and the nativist and nationali…

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