BEYOND DRY FACTS

Podcaster and geneticist Razib Khan picks four recent books on ancient cultures

- 

I want to reflect on four books that made a major impact on me in 2025; what all four share is a focus on the history of people, their practices and their folkways, not the dry recitation of battles and the rise and fall of kings.

Laura Spinney's Proto is about the reconstruction of a lost language, the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, spoken by about half of the world's people, but in the course of the narrative you survey fields as disparate as comparative linguistics, archaeology and the politics of identity. Proto hints at the toxicity that has been associated with the 'Indo-European question', but moves the reader over and over back to the scientific issues at hand and the latest results.

THE INDOEUROPEANS REDISCOVERED

How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story

By J.P. Mallory THAMES & HUDSON £35; 448 pages