Proto-Indo-European was spoken by pastoralists in the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 3500-2500 BCE, and their expansion across Eurasia through wagon-based mobility and patron-client relationships established the foundation for most European and many Asian language families.

Large language models do not simulate human cognition but instead computationally realize the structuralist theory of language as a complex, poetic sign-system, proving that language is cultural and generative before it is referential or cognitive, which demands a 'general poetics' of computational-cultural meaning in place of both cognitive science's 'remainder humanism' and poststructuralism's abandonment of concrete linguistic analysis.

Writing fundamentally transforms human consciousness by restructuring thought patterns from the oral-formulaic to the visual-analytic, creating new possibilities for abstract reasoning while distancing humans from the communal immediacy of primary oral cultures.