FIGURES

The first figure is a vertical timeline, with an arrow at the top pointing beyond zero and continuing upwards, going down in the following dates starting from top indicating years ago. 0: Nearly half of humanity speaks Indo-European. 500: Europeans carry Indo-European languages to new continents. 1,000: Anatolian and Tocharian are extinct. 1,600: Fall of Western Roman Empire. 4,000: Earliest written evidence of an Indo-European language, Hittite. 5,500: Yamnaya culture emerges. 6,500: Varna’s coppersmiths are thriving. 12,000: Invention of agriculture in Near East. 20,000: The peak of the last Ice Age. 60,000: Homo sapiens permanently settles Europe and Asia.
A spider chart showing Indo-European at the top, with Indo-Tocharian just below, branching off to the many other languages. Branching from Indo-Tocharian are: Balto-Slavic, to Baltic, with Old Prussian, Lithuanian, and Latvian; and Balto-Slavic to Slavic, which in turn gives us West (Polish, Slovak, Czech), South (Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Old Church Slavonic), and East Slavic (Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian). Germanic languages split into North Germanic (Old Norse to Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian), Old Swedish (Swedish), Old Danish (Danish) and West Germanic, which includes Old English (English), Old Frisian (Frisian), and Old Dutch (Middle Dutch that splits into Dutch, Flemish and Afrikaans). West Germanic also splits into Old Low German and Low German, Old High German that splits into German and Yiddish. East Germanic gives us Gothic. Celtic splits off from Indo-Tocharian and gives us Goidelic (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx) and Brittonic (Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Gaulish). Italic splits off from Indo-Tocharian and gives us Latino-Faliscan (Faliscan and Latin – Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, French, Italian, Rhaeto-Romance, Romanian). And it also gives us Osco-Umbrian (Oscan, Umbrian). Languages that split from Indo-Tocharian also include Albanian, Phrygian, Hellenic (Greek), Armenian. Indo-Iranian splits off from Tocharian and gives us Indic, Sanskrit (Sindhi, Romani, Urdu, Hindi, Bihari, Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sinhalese). There is Nuristani and then Iranic (Pashto, Baluchi, Kurdish, Sogdian, Avestan) and also Old Persian from Iranic which gives us Persian and Pahlevi. Also from Indo-Tocharian we have Tocharian which splits into Tocharian A and Tocharian B. Splitting directly from Indo-European is Anatolian, which gives us Hittite, Lwian, Lydian, and Lycian. Languages with uncertain placement are contained in a box to the bottom right of the graph and include Messapic, Illyrian, and Thracian.