The Tower of Babel described in Genesis may have been built not in Babylon, as the biblical account states, but in New Guinea. In the western part of the island, Papua New Guinea, located north of Australia, about 840 languages are spoken despite a population of barely 12 million. By comparison, Europeans — 745 million people — speak a quarter of that number of languages. Such linguistic diversity is exceptional in today’s world, but it wasn’t in the past: a study published in Science shows how the Tower of Babel rose over the last 12,000 years, peaking a few millennia ago and then beginning to crumble.
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