This Is What Humans Used To Sound Like 8,000 Years Ago And It's Terrifying

Weird yourself out today by listening to what humans used to sound like thousands of years ago.

The sounds are sort of like an unholy combination of chipmunks and a really serious guy having sex.

You're listening to the Proto-Indo-European language -- the mother tongue of the largest family of languages, Indo-European, spoken around the world.

English, French, Spanish, German and Punjabi all descended from this language, which experts have roughly dated back to between 6,000 and 2,000 BC.

There is nothing written down from that time, so researchers did their best to work out how humans may have sounded back then.

They put together this video that counts down numbers starting with how the number is said today and ending with how it would have been pronounced in Proto-Indo-European.

"One," for example, sounds like "oins," and "two" sounds like "dwoh."

Researcher John Aston from the University of Cambridge's Statistical Laboratory said,

Sounds have shape. As a word is uttered it vibrates air, and the shape of this soundwave can be measured and turned into a series of numbers. Once we have these stats, and the stats of another spoken word, we can start asking how similar they are and what it would take to shift from one to another.

Justify and explain it all you want, John, it still sounds like weird chipmunk sex to me.

Citations: This is the sound of how we all used to talk 8,000 years ago (Metro), Listen to our ancient 'mother tongue': Researchers recreate how words were spoken 8,000 years ago (Daily Mail), Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European (Archaeology Magazine)