The era of Big Data offers historical linguistics new roles, new possibilities, and urgent priorities. This course uses these new developments to draw up a linguistic prehistory and early history of the western Eurasian steppe and its periphery, in particular situating Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, indigenous Caucasian languages, and their ancestor(s) in space, time, and areal-typological context. Topics will include the phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic typologies of the Eurasian families, protolanguages, and isolates; current knowledge and sources on reconstructed protolanguages; mechanisms and routes of language spread; the typologically defined areas of western Eurasia; substratal effects and their likely sources; evaluation of proposed deep genetic connections; how and when and where the linguistic Europeanization of Italic-Celtic/Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Finnic proceeded. Students will get an understanding of this large historical picture as well as models and guidance in raising hypotheses, developing a research proposal on a topic of interest, and relevant conventions of 21st-century scientific writing.