Laura Spinney

So thank you, Jack R, for our first question.

Jack said, I listened with interest to your episode with Laura Spinney about ancient languages, and it made me think about the recent far-right protests in the UK and how we're all migrants, really.

How can politicians better articulate that message, as I fear the constant online disinformation about this issue could usher in far-right politicians next elections? Thank you, Jack.

What do you say, Jason?

We're all immigrants.

Even Africans who might be born very near where Homo sapiens sapiens emerged are immigrants.

What we can take from Laura Spinney's treatment of ancient languages is just how mobile people were in the past, how they fused cultural trends, changed their language, had that language influenced by the people they were speaking to in terms of consonant shifts, and how grammar changed over time.

Yes, in some places there was more continuity, and in other places there were more discontinuities.

One interesting aspect of Indo-European societies was a right of manhood for elite boys of a common age.

Per Laura Spinney, after an initiation likely involving a sacrifice of dogs, the boys were ejected from their tribe and spent the next few years wreaking havoc in the nearby wilderness.

They took as their symbol the migratory, predatory wolf, and lived a life of nakedness, promiscuity, and war.

At the end of the period, the boys came back to rejoin their tribe, taking their place as married men and full-fledged warriors.

And this could get really worrying because I think it could lead to a sort of a, a back to the interwar era, but I think that that's what's gonna happen.

Wow, and I'm gonna just say that this really pulls out what we discussed earlier in the week with Laura Spinney about Indo-European languages and the Mackinder thesis whereby Ukraine is the pivot of geostrategy.

Europe is the world island, and if there is a great power competition between China, the US, and Russia, it's over Europe.

And therefore, getting Europe together to fight off that great power competition or to be its own pole is so critical.

Regular listeners will know that I spend quite a lot of time worrying about migration, nationalism, Ukraine, technology, borders, identity, and usually treating them within uniquely 20th and 21st century lenses.

And today's guest, Laura Spinney, is truly one of my favorite authors.

I've literally recommended her books to many friends.

I bought them as presents for five or more people.

And more recently with Simon Sebeg Montefiore about how ancient geographical fault lines keep rudely intruding into supposedly modern geopolitics.

But perhaps Mackinder didn't go back far enough to see the deeper order of things brewing out from the Ukrainian steppe to the entire Eurasian landmass and from the Eurasian landmass into all of human history.

To find out, I'm joined by acclaimed science writer and bestselling author Laura Spinney, author of Proto.

Laura, welcome to Disorder.

So we have a retired American general coming up and a bestselling historian on the origins of human language.

That's Laura Spinney.

That's all in the next few weeks.

I think it's going to be great stuff.

You said you'd stand by me in the middle of chapter three, but you were up to your own tricks and kept us far by the sea.

Good afternoon and welcome to Bookmarked, where today the book under discussion is Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney.

And my guest, whom I'm very happy to welcome, is Dr. Richard Worms.

Rich is professor of anthropology at Texas State, where he's been teaching for almost 40 years.

Oh, good.

All right.

Okay, our author, Laura Spinney, is a British science journalist, novelist, and nonfiction writer.

Her best-known book is Pale Rider.

So I have a selection of books to share with you.

So the main one I want to share is Proto by Laura Spinney, which came out in 2025.

And it's how one ancient language went global.

And Laura Spinney is a journalist who has written, I think, only one other book.

One of the books is on Audible, shall we say, which I loved.

I read it during the pandemic and it is called Pale Rider and was about what we used to call the Spanish flu epidemic.

We see the spread of the language.

We see it fits together.