time in the past, starting about 4000 BCE (6000 BP) expanded through migration and cultural influence. This started a complex process of population blend or population replacement, acculturation and language change of peoples in many regions of western and southern Eurasia. This process gave origin to many languages and branches of this language family. By the end of the second millennium BC Indo-European speakers were many millions and lived in a vast geographical area in most of western and southern Eurasia (including western Central Asia). In the following two millennia the number of speakers of Indo-European languages increased even further. By geographical area, Indo-European languages remained spoken in big land areas, although most of western Central Asia and Asia Minor was lost to another language family (mainly Turkic) due to Turkic expansion, conquests and settlement (after the middle of the first millennium AD and the beginning and middle of the second millennium AD respectively) and also to Mongol invasions and conquests (that changed Central Asia ethnolinguistic composition). Another land area lost to non-Indo-European languages was today's Hungary due to Magyar/Hungarian (Uralic language speakers) conquest and settlement. However, in the second half of the second millennium AD, Indo-European languages expanded their territories to North Asia (Siberia), through Russian expansion, and North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand as the result of the age of European discoveries and European conquests through the expansions of the Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and the Dutch. (These peoples had the biggest continental or maritime empires in the world and their countries were major powers.) The contact between different peoples and languages, especially as a result of European colonization, also gave origin to the many pidgins, creoles and mixed languages that are mainly based in Indo-European languages (many of which are spoken in island groups and coastal regions). Ancestral (Proto-Indo-European) Proto-Indo-European (extinct) (see also Proto-Indo-European homeland) Early Proto-Indo-European (First phase of Indo-European) Middle Proto-Indo-European ("Classical" Indo-European) Late Proto-Indo-European (Last phase of indo-European as spoken language before splitting into several languages that originated in the regional dialects that diverged in time, and in space with Indo-European migrations, these languages were the direct ancestors of today's subfamilies or "branches" of descendant languages) (larger clades of Indo-European than the individual subfamilies or the way individual subfamilies are related to each other is still an unresolved issue) Dating the split-offs of the main branches Although all Indo-European languages descend from