Amazon Book Description
- One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.
- Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.
- Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.
- Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?
- In Proto, acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread these tongues far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists racing to recover this lost world. What they have discovered has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again.
- Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
- Laura Spinney is a science journalist and writer. She is the author of the celebrated Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. Her writing on science has appeared in National Geographic, Nature, The Guardian and The Atlantic, among others. Born in the UK, she lives in Paris.
Amazon Customer Reviews - Negative1
- Review 1
- I give her credit because it's a well-written, engaging book and she drops some interesting factoids even I didn't know though I have been studying Indo-European archaeology and linguistics for 30 years. But ultimately, I can't condone the way she minimizes the genocidal impact of the Indo-European takeover. I get it, it's politically sensitive to say our ancestors2 committed genocide. And yes, while there were times and places where it was clear, sudden destruction, there were other places where it was a slow infiltration, kind of like the colonization of North America. In evolutionary terms, the male genome of Western Eurasia was replaced very rapidly. It's hardly credible that there was no coercion and that the entire female population decided that Indo-European men were hotter.
- Geneticist David Reich says that the transformation of life that came with the Indo-Europeans was the most significant transformation of human life EVER, in our hundreds-of thousands-of years-history. Any book about the Indo-European "migrations" that mentions only very obliquely that they brought war, male dominance, class inequality, and environmental destruction to what had been an egalitarian, mostly peaceful world3 .. is in very poor taste.
- This original colonization of Europe around 3500 was repeated 3000 years later in the Americas. Imagine the pushback you would get if you wrote a glowing book about the colonization of the Americas that painted the colonizers as "more adapted" than the people who were there before? Yeah. That wouldn't go over well4. So why does this?
- I've never suggested a book in an Amazon review before, but, "Daeva (Elisha) - Before War: On Marriage, Hierarchy, and Our Matriarchal Origins" is an excellent companion to Proto that actually tells it like it is. And is also well-written and engaging, but without tip-toeing around important truths.
- Review 2
- Enjoyed the book until the last 1 1/2 hours when the author left the research and entered into her own view of the future... the coming global migrations due to the human species. The issue of climate change is not my point. The author was very careful throughout the book to qualify points of view, and offer alternative conclusions until the concluding chapter. In her view, the coming calamity of climate change5 is a GIVEN. No qualifying statement. If you are comfortable with that CONCLUSION... go for it. In my view, she lost her credibility6 when she left her field of expertise and offered her opinion as fact.
In-Page Footnotes ("Spinney (Laura) - Proto: A New History of Our Ancient Past")
Footnote 1:
- There are lots of positive Amazon reviews, and the - very brief - quotes from professional reviewers are all positive, if uninformative in the main.
- I quote a couple of '2 star' reviews that are more critical.
- The first I find irritating, and references a book I'm sure I'll find even more irritating.
- The second I'm more sympathetic towards, but it's really only 'against' the last chapter.
Footnote 2:
- These 'ancestors' are very remote. Human history is full of genocides of one sort or another - many very recent. We should be worried about them.
Footnote 3:
- How can this happy state possibly be known? And have there not been wonderful advances and successes in the progress of 'civilisation'?
Footnote 4:
- Well, it should 'go over well' because it's true, depending on what's meant by 'adapted'. Native Americans might have been perfectly 'adapted' to their isolated, static society, but not to stresses that came upon them. The invaders weren't initially 'adapted' to the new environment but 'adapted' to it because they were more 'adaptable'. Maybe not as individuals, but as a civilisation with outside support.
- Also, native North or South America weren't paradises, but had their own problems of 'patriarchy' and conflict. Part of the reason conquest was so easy - technology and disease apart - was that the native peoples already had their oppressors and sometimes sided with the invaders.
Footnote 5:
- I'm sympathetic to the view that certain areas of the world will become uninhabitable (though humans have always coped with 'uninhabitable' places, just not with the huge populations that now dwell there. Migration may be an issue (though current issues with migration are mostly down to war and generic poverty and the perception that the West is - at least to some degree - 'welcoming').
Footnote 6:
- Depends on what is meant. An expert straying into a field in which they are not an expert doesn't thereby lose credibility in their area of expertise.
Book Comment
William Collins, 7 May 2026
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)