And does the myth of Herod and the massacre of the children have any relation to the practice?

She makes this claim at several occasions in her book The Hindus: An Alternative History: that Sanskrit, as we understand it, was the language of the priestly caste (the Brahmins), invented for the purposes of religious rituals and operations, and is therefore younger than the "natural" language which she calls "Prakrit". On page 5, for instance she says:

It must have been the case that the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars came first, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later. But South Asianists often seem to assume that it is the other way around, that the dialects are “derived from Sanskrit,” because Sanskrit won the race to the archives and was the first to be written down and preserved, and we only encounter vernaculars much later. So we say that Sanskrit is older, and the vernaculars younger. But Sanskrit, the language of power, emerged in India from a minority, and at first its power came precisely from its nonintelligibility and unavailability, which made it the power of an elite group. Walt Kelly’s Pogo used to use the word “Sam-skrimps” to describe highfalutin double-talk or manipulative twaddle. Many Euro-Americans mispronounce it “Sanscript,” implying that it is a language without (sans) an (intelligible) script, or “Sand-script,” with overtones of ruined cities in the desert or a lost language written in sand.

The idea that "Prakrit" (which is a term primarily used to refer discretely to the different Middle Indo-Aryan languages spoken from the 600s BCE to about 1000 CE) is older than Sanskrit is rather problematic, because it has (to the best of my knowledge) been definitively established that the Middle Indo-Aryan languages were descendants of the Old Indo-Aryan languages (of which Vedic Sanskrit is the only attested form). She seems to completely discount Vedic Sanskrit (which is mentioned only twice in the entire book) and of its being (again, to the best of my knowledge) the probable provenance of the Prakrits. She also draws no distinction between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, or of the stages of development between the two forms. This leaves the reader with the impression that Classical Sanskrit (which she refers to simply as "Sanskrit") was a limited and artificial tongue derived from the Prakrits, instead of both being mutations of Vedic Sanskrit. (She also provides no linguistic evidence to support her suppositions.)

Is that impression correct? Am I missing something crucial?

If germs hadn't been discovered yet, how did they think that the smallpox were being transmitted to the Native Americans?

Is knowledge of the Ice Ages limited to modern times, or did any pre-modern/ancient civilizations know or guess about their existence, or even include them in their creation myths?

Many thanks!

How old is the concept of time travel? Would the concept have even been coherent to premodern peoples, or is it primarily a cultural artefact of the industrial and space eras?

I ask because I noticed that in the mythologies/folklore I am aware of, there are all kinds of supernatural powers, but I can't recall time travel being one of them.

I'm aware the sword was more of a symbol during the first crusade, but how often was it used in battle? Did only high ranking officers or nobles use the weapon or did common soldiers utilize it as well?

I managed to dig up some kind of student newspaper from my grandfather's belongings, and it was called the Soledad Canyonite. The papers mention March and June of 1935, as well as teachers of some sort. I was curious if this was a school camp, a boy scout kind of camp, or some other retreat, but I can't find any info on it.

There was no real medicine and/or hygiene at the time, so how did the plague come to an end? I know there are some ongoing cases, but why wasn't the plague killing people at the same prevalence as today's flu every year throughout the world until treatment became available?

All the extra rounds that didn't make contact with anything (bomber gunners, fighters, etc) had to go somewhere, right? Air to air attacks really weren't very accurate.

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In the movie the main character Lyudmila Pavlichenko has romantic relations with different men in the same unit as her, and so do many others. Was this as common as it is portrayed in the film?

I'm talking about language, culture, architecture, art, etc. Anything that might make it apparent today (even to non-historians or non-archaeologists) that they once controlled the territory.

The question also applies to other Germanic peoples that settled in Iberia prior to the Visigoths (I only know about the Vandals and Suebi).

I would like to know what makes these two branches distinguishable from one another, and how each factored into America's wars.

Kind of an unusual question, but I was thinking about how there's a litany of commercially available guitar polishes, waxes, fretboard cleaners, fretboard oils, etc. When did this attention to cleaning or polishing string instruments come into being?

Before the advent of specifically made stringed instrument polishes, what did musicians use?

Even further before that, how about in antiquity? Was it a common practice to polish and clean string instruments in the 15th to 19th centuries?