Earlier today I was watching a course on writing systems. This particular lecture concerned decipherment of dead languages. The lecturer mentioned the tower of Babel. Not that long ago people believed all languages derived from the Hebrew language based solely on the Bible's account of God punishing cooperative people who spoke together and understood one another.
The lecturer used it as an example of a language once used that no longer existed. The language in the region was proto-Semitic. The far more popular precursor language for Eurasia used to be called Aryan. That name fell out of favor following the unpleasantness of the 1940s. It is now called Proto-Indo-European. A very large number of languages have PIE as its root language.