I Read a Book - Proto by Laura Spinney
Proto is a book summarising the current best understanding of the origins of the Indo-European language family and its major subfamilies, telling the story of their movement through space based on the artefacts and genetic evidence they left behind.
I'm not a book reviewer nor a linguist nor an archaeologist, so I'll keep my thoughts on Proto pretty brief. I am also about as big of a linguistics enthusiast as you can be while still being almost entirely monolingual.
Proto is at it's core a popular science book, and so it lives and dies on factoids.
And factoids abound, mostly around cognate words that demonstrate language relationships. Among these the most interesting to me (and my current low-level language study) is that the Chinese and French words for honey share a common ancestor, despite being entirely unrelated languages having no obvious indication how Chinese could borrow such a word over 1000 years ago.
As it happens, this is due to the extinct Tocharian languages being spoken by a group of Indo-European settlers in what is modern day Xinjiang in Western China - on the Silk Road. The Chinese word mì was borrowed from a word used by Tocharian traders. A word which, like the French word miel, derived from a word used by Indo-Europeans before the Tocharian branch split off from the main trunk some 5000 years ago.
Though the idea of a "main trunk" is my own wording and leans heavily on survivorship bias, the book explores all this very thoroughly. Great pains are taken to humanise and fully realise the people being discussed as more than simply the logical conclusions of some deductive reasoning - we speak the way we speak because these people lived in environs and held beliefs that influenced the way they spoke.
We learn a great deal about their culture by reconstructing the words they did or didn't have in their vocabulary. By isolating genetic indicators we see a migratory path which in this "main trunk" tells a story of a nomadic, aggressive, and integrationist culture - one which took moved from place to place claiming land and social and linguistic prominence across fragmented European regions, but also settled in to the local ways of life while applying their own new priorities. It's a compelling narrative.
It also ends the tour with a sobering reminder of the fragility of the artefacts and genetic evidence required to tell such stories. Burials may seem safe under the ground, but humans tend to use specific locations because they offer us safety and bounty, and those parameters have never truly changed since the stone age - we have a bad habit of building and fighting over land which has always appealed as a place to settle.
Proto feels timely - the historian's job is never done, but there is a sense that it would be a long wait before a significant discovery could cause a significant rewrite of the text. I'd strongly recommend it if you have any interest in linguistics, prehistory, or human society.