Researchers believe that mother, bark and spit are among 23 oldest known words and that they date back by 15,000 years.

These words are: thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm.
At the beginning of the study, Mark Pagel of the University of Reading's School of Biological Sciences and his colleagues looked at 200 words that linguists agree are common among all European and Asian languages.
They then determined which sounded similar and had comparable meanings across the different languages.
Next, Pagel and his team determined the roots of those words, resulting in the list of 23.
"Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography," Pagel and his team wrote in the PNAS paper.
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Source-ANI