This is the story of the descendants of Japheth, the people we call the Indo-Europeans.

Today, Indo-European is a language family. With about a hundred, it is not the largest family in terms of total number of languages. However, it is the world's largest in terms of the total number of speakers. There are almost 2 billion native speakers of an Indo-European language, and many more non-native speakers, together comprising well over half of the earth's total population.

Indo-European languages cover practically all of Europe, the Americas and Australia, and vast sections of Africa and Asia. All languages of modern Europe, with the exception of Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish and a few others, belong to this family.

And all these languages came from a single, Late Stone Age tribe -- the Indo-Europeans -- speaking a single language that we call Proto Indo-European.