Interesting article which appeared in yesterday’s Metro newspaper.

In summery:
Researchers at the University of Reading claim that they have identified 23 words still in current use which they believe were being spoken as long as 15,000 years ago.
Using statistical models, the team identified a linguistic super-family tree made up of the seven major language families of Eurasia. These ‘ultraconserved’ words were identified after feeding them into a model which calculates their rate of replacement based on the frequency they are used today.
Researchers studied cognates, words which have the same meaning and roughly the same sound in different languages.
Some of the words believed to have been spoken include – I, we, you, not, mother, bark, hand, spit, fire, ashes, worm, pull, hear, give, black, flow and thou.

So now we know!