It does mean something very interesting: almost all surviving western languages come from a hypothesized, singular(ish) language (PIE). And PIE existed within the last 10ky.
It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction).
"We don't know" doesn't mean "a 50,000 BCE human could speak fluently with a 40,000 BCE human." I couldn't do that with someone from 1326 AD in "English" - and I study that era's language.
I have no idea how this is a reply to what I wrote. I agree with you but it's unrelated.
It shows there was an influx of linguistic influence from a migrating group. There were many waves of such things. Genetically Europeans are continuous with populations with the pre-PIE influx too.
Language did change fast before PIE, in all likelihood. But it didn't have to be "progress", it could have been regular churn just as it's been since then. PIE wasn't more primitive in grammatical capabilities than modern languages.
And PIE wasn't a just one language or one tiny tribe necessarily. But had many variants and dialects and relatives and other languages living near it from which it borrowed. There is no indication that anything out of the ordinary was going on at that time. It was regular language stuff as it's been before and after.
And it matters that we can't go further back because it's not unlikely that there could be other relationships, like PIE being connected to
Proto-Uralic potentially, but we can't really substantiate this at such distance in time. But it's not implausible by itself. Just can't show it at this temporal distance and this rate of natural churn.
It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction).
"We don't know" doesn't mean "a 50,000 BCE human could speak fluently with a 40,000 BCE human." I couldn't do that with someone from 1326 AD in "English" - and I study that era's language.