This infographic tells the story of the evolution of language through the lens of one of the oldest fairy tales known to anthropologists and linguists, The Smith and the Devil. I wanted a to use a literal tree rising from a book for this graphic, with each branch representing a major linguistic branch, each leaf an individual language. I hired illustrator David Curtis to bring my vision to life. Jonathon Keats wrote the copy, the finished piece appeared in the May 2017 issue of Discover magazine.