And Now for Something Completely Different: Proto-World!

In the next series of posts I am going to tackle the following questions:

1. Was there a time when all humans spoke the same language? Or, in other words, was there a time when the total population of our species (presumably restricted to some part of Sub-Saharan Africa) constituted a single speech community?
   [Too Many to Communicate]

   

   Athanasius Kircher, Turris Babel
   Source: Heidelberg University Library

2. Are all the recorded languages ultimately related? Note that this question is not a rephrasing of the previous one. In the past, there could have been any number of extinct languages unrelated to those known to us. The common ancestry of the known languages would be compatible with the multilingualism of early humans.
   
   [One Big Family? Evidence, Please]
3. If all the known language families are ultimately related, is it possible to reconstruct some features of their most recent common ancestor (variously referred to as Proto-World, Proto-Human or Proto-Sapiens)?
   
   [Backwards in a Perfect Tree]
   [The Uncertainty Principle in Linguistic Reconstruction]
4. What shall we make of the global family trees and global etymologies already proposed by some researchers? How plausible are they?
   
   [Morphemes Are Forever]
   [Related or Similar by Chance?]
   An excursus on Eurasiatic etc.
   [Eurasiatic? It Ain't No Rocket Science]
   [Hypotheses Aren't Facts]
   [Mind the Asterisk!]
   [Eurasiatic: A Wild Pursuit (1)]
   [Eurasiatic: A Wild Pursuit (2)]
   [The Inca Connection: a Quechua Word Game]
   Here endeth the excursus
   [Water, Water Everywhere: Back to Global Etymologies]
   [The Water Story]
   [Wild Waters]
   [A Water Word that Wasn't There]
   [Global Water for the Last Time]

Stay tuned in, please. I’ll probably start tomorrow.