Pinpointing a home of the first Indo-European speakers is a
charged task that David Anthony takes seriously. Measuring teeth
from dead horses in upstate New York seems an unlikely way to
get at the truth behind some of the most controversial questions
about the Old World. But David Anthony, a historian and
archaeologist at Hartwick College, discovered that by comparing
the teeth of modern horses with their Eurasian ancestors, he
could determine where and when the ancient ones were ridden. And
answering that seemingly arcane question is important if you
want to explain why nearly half the world today speaks an Indo-
European language. The origin of Indo-European tongues has
roiled scholarship since a British judge in eighteenth-century
Calcutta noticed that Sanskrit and English were related.
Generations of linguists have labored to reconstruct the mother
from which sprang dozens of languages spoken from Wales to
China. Their bitter disputes about who used proto-Indo-European,
where they lived, and their impact