ToB began life in 1998 as the personal homepage of Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (1953-2005), who, until his untimely demise on 09.30.2005, had been Russia’s leading specialist in diachronical studies and unofficial head of the so-called “Moscow school of comparative linguistics”. [A special section dedicated to his memory is now a part of the site].
Today, a decade since its humble origins, ToB has turned into a massive resource, containing huge amounts of information on almost all of Eurasia’s language families and slowly starting to venture beyond the relatively well researched linguistic groups into other parts of the world. Not only that, but ToB attempts to present the existing historical links between all of these groups, trying to look less like a jumbled mess of incoherent data and more like a scientifically organized, hierarchical structure; less like merely an encyclopaedia of knowledge and more like a viable tool for further research in the prehistory of mankind.
