alt Hacker NewsFrom a different perspective, it's not that wild at all - if you go back far enough, there's a decent chance that we all speak languages in the same "language family".
After all, being part of the same language family doesn't imply that strong a connection - English resembles, say, Farsi very very little. It just means that "the people who spoke language A at one point split off from the same people who split off to speak language B". From that angle, that the same language family is spoken in New Zealand and Madagascar is roughly as wild as the fact that homo sapiens lives in both places.
What's really wild is that modern linguistics has managed to demonstrate that the Austronesian languages are related across those vast distances and time spans.
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That presumes that languages didn't evolve independently across different communities. The fact that different ancient languages have completely different grammatical structures, for example, provides some evidence of this.
If you generalise enough, all comparisons become useless: Sure, all Sapiens have common ancestors.
That doesn’t take away from the wonder of imagining people thousands of years ago literally travelling across half the earth to settle somewhere else, people we usually consider as extremely different and more "primitive" than we are.
Learning that these people led in fact a life very similar to ours, were intellectually equivalent to us, had the same struggles and goals and aspirations we do (for the most part of course), is deeply fascinating, to me at least.