The Indo-European Family Tree

Before seeing this page, I had always assumed that PIE was a lot older. It’s amazing how much linguistic development has occurred in ~6,500 years!

Great project. One thing that is masked by the tree view though is that there were indeed countless other languages being spoken besides Proto-Indo-European. It's just the one that gave rise to today's Indo-European languages. But back then it wasn't alone, but just one of many, some related to it and some more distant from it. Kinda similar to how it works today. It had dialects, it was in motion and change, it had earlier versions etc. etc.

Kinda funny that Bavarian is more distant from 'High German' than Yiddish :D (not exactly wrong though, Yiddish is easier to understand for any non-Bavarian than hardcore Bavarian).

There's at least a dozen local German dialects missing which are just as 'weird' as Bavarian though (PS: ok, all the main dialects spoken in the northern parts of Germany seem to be there, just in their own 'heritage node'), I guess Bavarian earned its own spot because it has the most speakers.

I can image the moment Sir William Jones realized Sanskrit and Latin had a common origin. "Wait a minute...these can't all be coincidences." It's pretty mid-blowing.

Cool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.

PIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.

Very well organized.