Now evolutionary biologists have jumped in where linguists fear to tread, namely the stormy question of when and where Indo-European languages originated. Russell Gray and his student Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand are reasonably confident this group of 87 languages -- as diverse as English, Lithuanian and Gujarati -- arose between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago. Proceeding on the belief that "language, like biological species, diverge with time," Gray used a technique from a branch of research called molecular phylogenetics
