Archeological Elegance

A series of buildings with three large balconies have emerged in an area now being excavated. On one of the balconies, pots of wine lying on their side [were also found, which were] probably put out to dry in the sun," the statement continued.

Experts will now restore the houses, which will be open to the public as part of a new tour route at the popular site once the necessary work has been completed.

The street is the latest in a series of novel finds over the past few weeks, with excavations underway to stabilize walls at risk of collapse. Just a week earlier, archaeologists were able to cast the complete figure of a horse for the first time ever at the site. Along with a pig and a dog, it is one of the few animals of any species to be successfully cast at Pompeii.

People who moved out of southern China cultivated big changes across ancient Southeast Asia, a new analysis of ancient human DNA finds.

Chinese rice and millet farmers spread south into a region stretching from Vietnam to Myanmar. There, they mated with local hunter-gatherers in two main pulses, first around 4,000 years ago, and again two millennia later, says a team led by Harvard Medical School geneticist Mark Lipson. Those population movements brought agriculture to the region and triggered the spread of Austroasiatic languages that are still spoken in parts of South and Southeast Asia, the scientists conclude online May 17 in Science.

Over the past 20 years, accumulating archaeological evidence has pointed to the emergence of rice farming in Southeast Asia between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago, accompanied by tools and pottery showing links to southern China. Austroasiatic languages now found from Vietnam to India contain words for rice and agriculture, suggesting that ancient arrivals from southern China spoke an Austroasiatic tongue. Questions have remained, though, about where Austroasiatic languages originated and whether knowledge about farming practices, rather than farmers themselves, spread from China into Southeast Asia.

Now, DNA from ancient Southeast Asians provides “clinching evidence” for the spread of farming via southern Chinese groups, says archaeologist Charles Higham of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who did not participate in the study. The new report aligns with other ancient DNA evidence of culture-changing population movements across parts of Asia starting around 5,000 years ago (SN: 11/25/17, p. 16). “Ancient human DNA is showing that prehistoric people were far more mobile and exploratory than has often been thought,” Higham says.

Lipson’s team obtained DNA from 18 human skeletons unearthed at five Southeast Asian sites dating to between around 4,100 and 1,700 years ago. These sites are located in Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia.

DNA preserves poorly in such hot, humid regions. A group led by study coauthor Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at the University of Vienna, recently found that human DNA survives best in a skull bone surrounding inner-ear structures that has especially dense tissue. In the new study, DNA was extracted from that bone for each ancient individual.

Roughly 4,000-year-old farmers at Vietnam’s Man Bac site displayed a close genetic relationship to present-day speakers of Austroasiatic languages, especially in southern China, Lipson’s group says. About 25 to 30 percent of the Man Bac farmers’ ancestry came from hunter-gatherers, the scientists estimate, perhaps due to interbreeding of rice growers and foragers in southern China before any migrations occurred. Many populations today that speak Austroasiatic languages also display a similar genetic signature. Genetic signs of additional hunter-gatherer ancestry, probably acquired in Southeast Asia, appeared in two of eight Man Bac farmers.

10.  Gokstad ship 900 CE

The Gokstad ship is a 9th-century Viking ship found in a burial mound at Gokstad in Sandar, Sandefjord, Vestfold, Norway. It is currently on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. 

9. Oseberg ship – 820 CE

The Oseberg ship is a well-preserved Viking ship discovered in a large burial mound at the Oseberg farm near Tønsberg in Vestfold county, Norway. This ship is commonly acknowledged to be among the finer artifacts to have survived from the Viking Era. The ship and some of its contents are displayed at the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy on the western side of Oslo, Norway.

8. Ancient Galilee Boat 50 BCE – 70 CE

The Ancient Galilee Boat, also known as the Jesus Boat, is an ancient fishing boat from the 1st century AD, discovered in 1986 on the north-west shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel.

7.  Nemi Ships 37-41 CE

The Nemi Ships were two ships, one ship larger than the other, built by the Roman emperor Caligula in the 1st century AD at Lake Nemi. Although the purpose of the ships is only speculated upon, the larger ship was essentially an elaborate floating palace, which contained quantities of marble, mosaic floors, heating and plumbing and amenities such as baths.

6. Kyrenia ship  400-300 BCE

The Kyrenia ship is the wreck of a 4th-century BC Greek merchant ship. It was discovered by Greek-Cypriot diving instructor Andreas Cariolou in November 1965 during a storm. Having lost the exact position Cariolou carried out more than 200 dives until he re-discovered the wreck in 1967 close to Kyrenia in Cyprus.

5. Ma’agan Michael Ship   400-500 BCE

The Ma’agan Michael Ship is a well-preserved 5th-century BCE boat discovered off the coast of Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, Israel, in 1985. 

4. Dover Bronze Age boat – 1500 BCE

Dover Bronze Age boat is one of fewer than 20 Bronze Age boats so far found in Britain. It dates to 1575–1520 BC, which may make it the oldest significantly intact boat in the world.

3.  Khufu ship – 2500 BCE

The Khufu ship is an intact full-size vessel from Ancient Egypt that was sealed into a pit in the Giza pyramid complex at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2500 BC. The ship now is preserved in the Giza Solar boat museum. The ship was almost certainly built for Khufu (King Cheops), the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Like other buried Ancient Egyptian ships, it was apparently part of the extensive grave goods intended for use in the afterlife, and contained no bodies, unlike northern European ship burials.

2. Dufuna Canoe – 6550 BCE

Dufuna Canoe is a canoe discovered in 1987 by a Fulani cattle herdsman a few kilometers from the village of Dufuna in the Fune Local Government Area, not far from the Komadugu Gana River, in Yobe State, Nigeria. Radiocarbon dating of a sample of charcoal found near the site dates the canoe at 8500 to 8000 years old, linking the site to Lake Mega Chad.

1. Pesse canoe – 8040 BCE

The Pesse canoe is believed to be the world’s oldest known boat, and certainly the oldest canoe. Carbon dating indicates that the boat was constructed during the early mesolithic period between 8040 BCE and 7510 BCE. It is currently housed in the Drents Museum in Assen, Netherlands.

There’s a whiff of magic about the site of Tell el-Amarna that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It’s partly down to the effort of imagination needed to conjure a great capital of ancient Egypt from the sea of low humps stretching between the cultivation and the desert cliffs, and partly the long shadows cast by its founders – the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.

Amarna came and went in an archaeological moment. It rose and fell with Akhenaten and his religious reformation, under which Egypt’s ancient pantheon of gods was briefly usurped by the worship of a single solar deity; the Aten.

On an uninhabited stretch of the Nile’s east bank, Amarna was founded, constructed and abandoned in under fifteen years. When Akhenaten died in 1332 BC, Egypt’s ancient religion was restored under his successor Tutankhamun and the heretical city of Amarna was flattened and forgotten.

Recent research at the site has focused on Amarna’s cemeteries; not the flashy rock-cut tombs of the royal family and its courtiers, but the simple desert graves of the ordinary Egyptians who lived and worked in Akhenaten’s city and never got to leave.

Sign up for Lab notes - the Guardian's weekly science update

Read more

Between 2006 and 2013 I was lucky enough to work for the Amarna Project on an excavation which aimed to recover four hundred individuals from a large cemetery behind the South Tombs cliffs, estimated to contain around six thousand badly looted burials. The study of these burials and their human remains has opened a new research window on life and death in the lower echelons of Egyptian society. They paint a picture of poverty, hard work, poor diet, ill-health, frequent injury and relatively early death.

In other respects the South Tombs Cemetery remains were fairly in line with expectations. There were modest variations in the wealth and style of burial, there was a fairly even mix of male to female individuals, and the age distribution showed the usual pattern for ancient populations; high infant mortality giving way to fewer deaths as children survive into early adulthood, with the death rate then rising again as adults succumb to illness, childbirth, injuries and age. This was all important and highly interesting, but not particularly unusual.

The North Tombs Cemetery

In 2015 we began excavating another non-elite cemetery in a wadi behind a further set of courtiers’ tombs at the northern end of the city, and here the tale takes a stranger turn. As we started to get the first skeletons out of the ground it was immediately clear that the burials were even simpler than at the South Tombs Cemetery, with almost no grave goods provided for the dead and only rough matting used to wrap the bodies.

As the season progressed, an even weirder trend started to become clear to the excavators. Almost all the skeletons we exhumed were immature; children, teenagers and young adults, but we weren’t really finding any infants or older adults. Our three excavation areas were far apart, spaced across the length of the cemetery, but comparing notes all three areas were giving the same result. This certainly was unusual and not a little bit creepy.

The initial skeletal analysis of 105 individuals excavated at the North Tombs Cemetery in 2015 has now been completed by Dr Gretchen Dabbs of Southern Illinois University, and it seems our initial impressions were absolutely right. More than 90% of the skeletons have an estimated age of between seven and twenty-five years, with the majority of these estimated to be younger than fifteen. Essentially, this is a burial place for adolescents.

This leaves us with some explaining to do. Seven to twenty-five is the age range in which people shouldn’t be dying; this is when health should be most robust in a normal population, yet for the people of the North Tombs Cemetery death seems to have come almost exclusively during these years. On the other hand, young infants, which usually abound in ancient cemeteries, are virtually absent with just three of the 105 skeletons estimated to be under seven years old. The North Tombs Cemetery shows the exact opposite of the usual demographic pattern for a cemetery.

The skeletal pathologies at the North Tombs Cemetery also had some curious features. For such a young population, traumatic injuries and degenerative conditions were very common. The majority of 15-25 year-olds had some kind of traumatic injury and around ten percent had developed osteoarthritis. Even in the under 15s, sixteen percent were found to have spinal fractures along with a range of other abnormalities usually associated with heavy workloads.

The most obvious explanation is not a pleasant one: This population seems to have been a workforce of children and teenagers who had to perform frequent heavy labour. Seven years old is about the earliest age that children might be expected to carry a load and follow instructions, hence the absence of younger skeletons. The absence of older adults suggests two possibilities; either workers were released or re-assigned when they reached full adulthood, or the nature of the work and living conditions meant that none of the workers lived much past twenty-five. Indeed, it seems they were lucky to make it to fifteen.

The isolation of these young people in death raises questions about how they lived. Family was very important in ancient Egypt and it was the responsibility of relatives to see that dead family members were properly provided for in the afterlife. The fact that the North Tombs Cemetery dead were buried with little care and virtually no grave goods strongly suggests that they were not returned to their families for burial but lived and died away from the care of relatives.

A further indication of the grimness of life for the young people of the North Tombs Cemetery comes from the multiple burials. 43% of graves contained more than one individual, which is way higher than the small proportion of multiple graves at the other Amarna cemeteries.

At the North Tombs Cemetery the multiple burials, sometimes holding as many as five or six skeletons, contain children of such similar ages that family relationship seems unlikely, while at the South Tombs Cemetery multiple burials appear to represent family groups. South Tombs multiple burials are laid side by side in graves dug to double or triple the usual width, but at the North Tombs Cemetery graves containing more than one skeleton are about the same size as the single burials with the bodies stacked directly on top of each other.

The implication of the North Tombs multiple burials may be that bodies were expected and a grave was dug at the cemetery without knowing how many bodies there would be. Sometimes there was just one body, but if more were delivered the same grave would do for all of them. Whether this collection of casualties was a daily, weekly or monthly occurrence is a matter for bleak speculation, but the cemetery is large, probably containing at least a couple of thousand burials.

Who is buried at the North Tombs Cemetery?

This is a difficult question at this early stage of the project and all our current theories have their drawbacks. The North Tombs Cemetery lies towards the main stone quarries and it seems most likely that these people were employed somewhere in the quarrying process as unskilled labour during the frantic construction of the new city.

One possibility is that these are Egyptian children, perhaps demanded from their families as a contribution to the construction of the new city, or singled out in some other way. Corvée-style labour, enforced and unpaid, was frequently used in ancient Egypt on major projects. It is also possible that these were the children of slaves and therefore viewed as more or less disposable. In either case, children seem to have been removed from their families with little intention of them being returned.

A further suggestion is that the North Tombs Cemetery may represent a captured or deported population brought to Amarna for labour. This is perfectly possible and would account for the lack of family contact and the apparent disregard shown for young life. On the other hand, there are no indications from the method of burial, the pottery and the few objects recovered to suggest that these people were not Egyptians.

We hope that future DNA analysis of the bones might clarify the geographical origins of the North Tombs Cemetery skeletons.

In any case, the evidence of the North Tombs Cemetery forces us to face the possibility that Akhenaten built his city at least partly with child labour.

For archaeologists, Amarna is both a blessing and a curse for understanding life in New Kingdom Egypt. On the one hand it provides a snap shot of a city of this period, conceived and built from scratch and not altered in later periods. On the other hand, Amarna is awkwardly exceptional in that it was built at great speed under an eccentric pharaoh and his strange new theology, so how representative might it really be?

If the building of Amarna employed child labour, could it have been a more widespread practice for state building projects in New Kingdom Egypt? At present comparable data from other Egyptian sites is very limited. The exceptional nature of Amarna makes it hard to extrapolate these findings from one highly unusual cemetery.

However, Egypt is littered with building projects of extraordinary scale by ancient standards, from pyramids and temples to canals and artificial lakes, commissioned by pharaohs with a similarly megalomaniac mind-set to Akhenaten. Perhaps when we marvel at these wonders of ancient engineering we should spare more thought for the price paid in human lives, some of them only just beginning, which constituted the cost of such high ambitions. Archaeologygives us the means to provide a counter narrative to the pharaonic bombast of the textual records and tell a grimmer tale of hard work and short lives.

The mummies, discovered at a depth of about 25 feet, are believed to be the bodies of priests and officials, The Associated Press reported. The burial ground included sarcophagi made of limestone and clay, animal coffins, and papyrus with Demotic script, not the hieroglyphs found in earlier Egyptian tombs.

The site was discovered near the village of Tuna al-Gabal, the site of a previously excavated necropolis for thousands of mummified animals. It was found last year by some Cairo University students using radar, Reuters reported. The mummies are believed to be more than 1,500 years old, and date to Egypt’s Greco-Roman period, a 600-year epoch that began in 332 B.C. after the region was conquered by Alexander the Great, said Mohamed Hamza, the dean of archaeology at Cairo University, who helped lead the excavations.     

This is the bold claim put forward by paleontologist Thomas Deméré and his colleagues in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The researchers say that the scratched-up mastodon fossils and large, chipped stones uncovered during excavation for a San Diego highway more than 20 years ago are evidence of an unknown hominin species, perhaps Homo erectus, Neanderthals, maybe even Homo sapiens.

If Deméré's analysis is accurate, it would set back the arrival date for hominins in the Americas and suggest that modern humans might not have been the first species to arrive. But the paper has raised skepticism among many researchers who study American prehistory. Several said this is a classic case of an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence — which they argue the Nature paper doesn’t provide.

“You can’t push human activity in the New World back 100,000 years based on evidence as inherently ambiguous as broken bones and nondescript stones,” said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University. “They need to do a better job showing nature could not be responsible for those bones and stones.”

For decades, discussion of early settlement of the Americas has focused on the tail end of the Ice Age. Most archaeologists agree that humans crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska sometime after 25,000 years ago, then either walked between ice sheets or took boats down the Pacific coastline to reach the wide open plains of Pleistocene America roughly 15,000 years before present. Though scientists debated the exact timing of this journey, their estimates differed by hundreds or a few thousand years, not tens of thousands. “It is a bold claim,” Deméré acknowledged, “an order of magnitude older age than has been suggested.” But he asked his colleagues not to dismiss the research out of hand based only on a number.“This evidence begs for some explanation,” he said, “and this is the explanation we’ve come up with.”The rocks and mastodon remains were identified in 1992 by paleontologist Richard Cerutti, a colleague of Deméré's at the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Cerutti was asked to monitor work on a new freeway south of San Diego in case any important fossils were uncovered. When Cerutti spotted a broken tusk stuck in the soil overturned by an excavator, he called for a halt in activity and summoned Deméré to the site.“You’ll want to see this,” Deméré recalled Cerutti saying.The scientists set up a geographic grid system and began carefully excavating several more stones and bones, plotting each new object on their grid to preserve its location. It took several months to uncover every artifact.“As the site unfolded over that five month period it became more and more exciting and more puzzling at the same time,” Deméré recalled.

The biggest find was a partial skeleton from a single American mastodon. Peculiarly, the largest bones were scarred and broken, but more fragile ribs and vertebrae were still intact. Some of the bones seemed to have been arranged deliberately alongside one another. Many bore the spiral fractures that are a signature of ancient people hammering on fresh bone — either to extract marrow for food or break the bone into tools.

The bones were clustered in groups around a few large, heavy stones known as “cobbles.” The size and makeup of these rocks didn’t match the fine-grained surrounding soil. They bore marks you'd expect to see on a hammer and anvil. Scattered around the site were flakes that seem to have been chipped off the cobbles, as though someone had struck the rocks against another solid object. When held up to their source stones, the flakes fit back into them like pieces of a puzzle.

“It was unusual to say the least … and suggested this was a not a typical paleontological site and we should consider the possibility that we had association of extinct megafauna with humans, or at least early human activity,” Deméré said of the findings.

But it was difficult to figure out how old the site was. Any soft tissue in the fossilized bones had long decayed, so scientists couldn’t use radiocarbon dating to determine their age. They attempted to date fossils using the uranium-thorium method, which measures radioactive decay of uranium. But the technique was not very reliable at the time, so the Cerutti mastodon remained an enigma.

More than a decade later, a mutual friend put Deméré in touch with archaeologist Steve Holen. Holen believes that human history in the Americas dates back much farther than the end of the Ice Age, something he acknowledges is a “minority position” in his field. For several years, he has been examining museum collections and new fossil sites in search of ancient bones that look like they were touched by people.

The breaks on the mastodon fossils looked as though they were human-caused, he said. But to make sure, Holen tried to recreate them using a stone hammer the same size as the one found at the Cerutti site and the skeleton of an elephant that had been recently buried.

“The bone was extremely fresh and smelled very bad,” Holen said of that experiment. “I almost wished I wasn't doing this.” It took all of Holen's effort — and the help of a younger, stronger colleague — to break the bones. When they succeeded, they recognized the same breakage patterns as the ones found on the fossils. There's no evidence that anyone hunted or butchered the mastodon for meat, but it definitely seemed to him like some human or human cousin had cracked the bones.

“Once you do the experiment then you really can understand this much better,” Holen said.

Next the team reached out to geochronologist James Paces, who retried the now much-improved uranium-thorium dating technique on the bones. He concluded that they are 130,000 years old, give or take 9,400. This date corresponds with the accepted age of the layer of rock in which the bones and cobbles were found.

But it far exceeds any established date for settlement of the Americas. The oldest biological remains from any humans on the continent is a coprolite (fossilized poop) from 14,300 years ago. Studies based on genetic analysis of modern Native Americans suggest that humans didn't make it over the land bridge that once linked northeast Asia to Alaska until 25,000 years ago.

If the stones and bones really are evidence of people, then who were they? How did they get to this part of the world so long ago? And why haven't we found other evidence of their presence? Did they die out not long after they arrived?

Because there are no hominin remains at the site, and rock hammer technology was used by many hominin species, the scientists caution that discussion of the identity of these people is purely speculative. In a supplement to their Nature paper, they say the Cerutti people may have been Neanderthals, Denisovans (a species known only from a few fragments found in a cave in northern Siberia), or members of the species Homo erectus. It seems unlikely that they were Homo sapiens — anatomically modern humans didn't migrate out of Africa until after 100,000 years ago, according to most estimates.

As for how they got here, Deméré said they may have been able to cross the land bridge before the last ice age, when the planet warmed and sea levels rose. Other species migrated to the Americas in this period, Deméré said, and the hominins may have followed them over.

Otherwise, the first Americans could have used boats to cross the Bering Strait, and then scoot down the Pacific coast — archaeological finds on the Mediterranean island of Crete suggest that hominins were able to cross the sea via boat more than 100,000 years ago.

To some who study American prehistory, this interpretation of the Cerutti site beggars belief. Meltzer called the claim “grandiose.” Donald Grayson, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Washington, noted that history is rife with examples of scientists misinterpreting strange markings on stone as evidence of human activity. He pointed to the Calico Hills site in the Mojave Desert, which the archaeologist Louis Leakey believed contained 200,000-year-old stone tools. Subsequent studies have largely discredited Leakey's claim — the apparent tools were most likely “geofacts,” natural stone formations that only look like they were crafted by humans.

“It is one thing to show that broken bones and modified rocks could have been produced by people, which Holen and his colleagues have done,” Grayson said. “It is quite another to show that people, and people alone, could have produced those modifications. This, Holen [has] most certainly not done, making this a very easy claim to dismiss.”

Mike Waters, the director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M, also criticized the claim. To convince him that people were in the Americas so much earlier before the first physical evidence of their remains, he would expect to see “unequivocal stone artifacts,” he said. He doesn't think the cobbles found at the Cerutti mastodon site meet that standard.

Rick Potts, the director of the Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History, was more measured in his appraisal. Though he thought the team's analysis of the bones and stones was thorough, he pointed out a few oddities about the site. For one, it's unusual that people would use hammer stones to process bones but not any sharp-edged tools, even though that technology had been around for more than a million years. For another, as he pointed out, the mastodon's molars were also crushed, and there's no reason he can think of that humans would crack the huge teeth. If those teeth were broken by natural forces, then perhaps the rest of the bones were too.

“It's not a solid case,” Potts said, “but my goodness it's a compelling one.”

Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at NMNH who specializes in studying tooth and tool marks on ancient bones, agreed.

“It’s funny because when I first started reading the paper I didn’t see the extra zero and I thought, 'oh, 13,000 years, this sounds good,'" Pobiner said. “And then I saw the extra zero and I thought, 'Holy cow!'”

Pobiner acknowledged that the Cerutti site contains less archaeological evidence than scientists would like before making a claim of this magnitude. But as someone who has spent her whole career looking at scratch marks and breakage patterns on bones, the evidence looks to her like it could be human modification.

Deméré said that he and his colleagues considered possible alternate explanations, but none seemed to fit. Trampling by another large animal would not produce those breakage patterns, they concluded. And environmental forces, like a powerful flood, would have broken the smaller, more fragile bones as well as the big one. Holen added that the rock layer in which the artifacts were found is largely intact — it does not seem to have been subject to disturbances like earthquakes or upheavals that would make the site more difficult to interpret.

Erella Hovers, an archaeologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who reviewed the paper and wrote an analysis of it for Nature, said she thought the researchers did a thorough job of ruling out natural causes of the particular breakage patterns. She added that the evidence looks much like archaeological sites she has studied in Africa and the Middle East; if the same site was found in that part of the world, she said, people would have fewer questions about it.

The Cerutti site researchers expect to face scrutiny from his colleagues about the paper. That is partly why they have made 3-D images of the mastodon fossils available online.

“I think the models are important in terms of supporting the paper because they allow anyone to look at this evidence in much the same way the co-authors did,” co-author Adam Rountrey, collection manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, said in a statement. “It’s fine to be skeptical, but look at the evidence and judge for yourself. That’s what we’re trying to encourage by making these models available.”

The scientists also hope that their paper will prompt their colleagues to take a closer look at this period in American history. Perhaps they will find more evidence of hominin presence, bolstering the Cerutti researchers' claim. Or perhaps the mastodon site is a fluke — or a mistake — and they will find nothing at all.

This linguistic map paints an alternative map of Europe, displaying the language families that populate the continent, and the lexical distance between the languages. The closer that distance, the more words they have in common. The further the distance, the harder the mutual comprehension.

The map shows the language families that cover the continent: large, familiar ones like Germanic, Italic-Romance and Slavic; smaller ones like Celtic, Baltic and Uralic; outliers like Semitic and Turkic; and isolates – orphan languages, without a family: Albanian and Greek.

Obviously, lexical distance is smallest within each language family, and the individual languages are arranged to reflect their relative distance to each other.

Take the Slavics: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are a Siamese quartet of languages, with Slovenian, another of former Yugoslavia's languages, extremely close. Slovakian is halfway between Czech and Croatian. Macedonian is almost indistinguishable from Bulgarian. Belarusian is pretty near to Ukrainian. Russia standa a bit apart, is closest to Bulgarian, but quite far from Polish.

Italian is the vibrant centre of the Italic-Romance family, as close to Portuguese as it is to French. Spanish is a bit further. Romania is an outlier, in lexical as well as geographic distance. Catalan is the missing link between Italian and Spanish. The map also shows a number of fascinating minor Romance languages: Galician, Sardinian, Walloon, Occitan, Friulian, Picard, Franco-Provencal, Aromanian, Asturian and Romansh. Latin, mentioned in the legend but not on the map, although no longer a living language, is an important point of reference, as it is the progenitor of all the Romance languages.

Lots of coldness in the Germanic family. The bigger members English and German, each keep to themselves. Dutch leans towards the German side, Frisian to the English side. Up north, the smaller Nordic languages cluster in close proximity; Danish, Swedish, Norwegian (both the Bokmal and Nynorsk versions). And look at the tiny Icelandic, Faroer and Luxembourgish languages. Aren't they cute?

The Celtic family portrait is a grim picture: small language dots, separated by a lot of mutual incomprehension: the distance is quite far between Breton and Welsh, a bit closer between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and further still between the first and second pair.

The Baltics constitute the smallest family, but a fatter pair. Still, Latvians and Lithuanians don't seem to be on very good speaking terms with each other.

All the aforementioned language families are part of the wider Indo-Germanic language tribe. Meaning that there are some points of convergence, even if the lexical distance is great. But it's nice to recognise an English fish in the Irish iasc, and to realise that the German Vater and the Greek pateras share an Indo-European root.

Even beyond the wider bonds of the Indo-European language family, some lexical links exist. Between Finnish and Swedish, for example. Not because of linguistics, but because of history and geography, having shared so much of both.

Which explains why even Basque, Europe's most isolated, most mysterious and probably oldest language, shares some distant traits with Spanish and Breton.

The Uralic group consists of two subgroups, one sort of uniting Estonian and Finnish, the other consisting of Hungarian all by itself. Answering the age-old linguistic conundra of whether Finnish and Hungarian are really related (yes) and if so, do they understand each other (somewhat worse than an Albanian and a Frenchman).