A groundbreaking study suggests humans may have experienced a forgotten era of extraordinary language diversity thousands of years ago, when communities across the planet could have spoken tens of thousands more languages than exist today. Researchers believe this lost “linguistic golden age” reached its peak before powerful states, migration and expanding civilizations transformed the way humans communicated.
Around 12,000 years ago, during the Early Holocene, Earth is estimated to have been home to between 4,500 and 6,200 languages . Although people lived in relatively isolated groups, the total global population was only about 5 million , limiting the number of distinct communities and, in turn, the number of separate languages that could emerge.
