alt Hacker NewsIs it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway.
[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]
No, I understand that people would know that Chinese existed far away. My point is that locally, PIE had neighbors, had variants, dialects, it had earlier forms, it was like a living language in a normal human context.
Maybe your brain works differently. I had this kind of misconception, imagining languages to be Pangea-like. That there used to be less linguistic diversity, there was a big uniform language (and perhaps a handful of others far away on the Earth) that later on fractured. But reality is more dynamic. PIE was just an ordinary language. And there was likely more linguistic diversity than today, due to less communication and travel opportunities and geographical features being more isolating.