New research from the University of Reading shows that Ice Age people living in Europe might have used forms of some common words including I, you, we, man and bark, that in some cases could still be recognised today.
Using statistical models, Professor of Evolutionary Biology Mark Pagel and his team predicted that certain words would have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to ten thousand or more years.
These words point to the existence of a linguistic super-family tree that unites seven major language families of Eurasia.
A difficulty with this approach is that two words might have similar sounds just by accident, such as the words team and cream.
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To combat this problem, Pagel's team showed that a subset of words used frequently in everyday speech, are more likely to be retained over long periods of time.
The team used this method to predict words likely to have shared sounds, giving greater confidence that when such sound similarities are discovered they do not merely reflect the workings of chance.
"As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per thousand in everyday speech were seven to ten times more likely to show deep ancestry in the Eurasian super-family," Pagel said.
Pagel's previous research on the evolution of human languages has built up a picture of how our 7,000 living human languages have evolved.