Evolution experts at The University of Reading have discovered that our Ice Age ancestors may have used parts of language used today.

Research has found that people living in Europe 15,000 years ago may have used forms of words including I, you, me, man and bark, which could be recognised now.

Using statistical models, Professor Mark Pagel and his team of evolutionary biologists, recognised certain words changed so slowly over time that they could travel back 10,000 or more years.

These point to a ‘super-family’ linguistic tree that unites seven major language families of Eurasia, namely Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut. Previously, linguists relied solely on studying shared sounds among words to identify those likely to be derived from common ancestral words such as the Latin pater and the English father.

A difficulty with this approach is that two words might have similar sounds just by accident, such as team and cream.

To combat this problem, Prof Pagel’s team showed that a subset of words used frequently in everyday speech were more likely to be retained over long periods of time.

The team used this method to predict words likely to have shared sounds, giving greater confidence that when such similarities are discovered they do not merely reflect the workings of chance.

Prof Pagel’s previous research on human languages has built up a picture of how our 7,000 living human languages have evolved and why some words survive and other become obsolete.

He said: “The way in which we use a certain set of words in everyday speech is something common to all human languages.

“We discovered numerals, pronouns and special adverbs are replaced far more slowly, with linguistic half-lives of once every 10,000 or even more years.

“As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per 1,000 in everyday speech were seven to 10 times more likely to show deep ancestry in the Eurasian super-family.”