Mother of Many Modern Languages Traced to Ancient Turkey

[Live Science]  English is one member of a large family, the Indo-European languages, that are now spoken by a huge swath of the world. But where they originated is the subject of controversy, with experts undecided between two areas of western Asia. Borrowing a technique used to reconstruct family trees for viruses, an international research team has come down squarely on one side of the debate: Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia, a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey, between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago, and were carried, at least in part, by the spread of agriculture.