[Virginia-American]

IIRC, the roots "tik" ("finger" also "one") and "pal" ("two", "split") are worldwide, but there are no worldwide cognates for larger numbers. This is consistent with hunting/gathering: some hunter/gatherers' languages have words for one and two, but no number names beyond that.

Instead the *grammar* may have singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural instead of a simple singular/plural like English.

Here's Glenn Morton showing the distribution of **tik and **akwa ("water" - which I think may be onomatopoetic gurgling)

And here's a version of Ruhlen's list.

I find all this fascinating.

[Virginia-American]

Notice that the second reference I posted mentions the hypothesis that all extant languages had a common ancestor on the order of 50,000 - 100,000 years ago. This fits nicely with the genetic "bottleneck" 70,000 years ago.