The word in the beginning

The common ancestor of the world's modern languages appears to be at least 100,000 years old, researchers said, Reuter reports from San Francisco. The University of California at Berkeley said the finding by Johanna Nichols, professor of Slavic languages, was based on the largest comparison of grammatical structures ever made. Her work suggests that languages arose long before modern humans spread out around the globe, while they were still inhabiting the tropical regions of Asia, Africa and the Near East.