What did Anatolia give to the world?

Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor, is the region of Turkey located East of the Bosporus strait. It is the westernmost part of Asia.

Human settlements of Anatolia date back to the Paleolithic. Much later, the historical records show a succession of people in the region since the 24th century BC: Hattians and Hurrians, Assyrians, Hittites, Mitanni, Hurrians, Neo-Hittites, Arameans, Luwians, Neo-Assyrians, Medes, Cimmerians, Scythians, Greeks, Byzantines, Mongols, and finally Turks.

What most of these people had in common is that their languages were of Indo-European origin. Not coincidentally, many linguists believe that Proto-Indo-European, the root languages of all Indo-European languages, was spoken in Anatolia many thousand years ago.

The hypothesis was first put forward by this study published in Nature a few years ago. A very interesting point is that the study was done by applying the theory of evolution to languages, and using words in the way genes are normally used in similar biological studies. 

If we trust its conclusion, this would make Anatolian the ancestor of around half of today’s languages, including Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, Hindi, German, French, Spanish, etc. 

The following video shows a possible evolution of language families from Anatolian.