[1] https://www.dk.com/uk/book/9780241226148-history-of-the-worl...
That is pretty hard to do, because nationalism wasn't really a thing before the 19th century in Europe.
So how do you identify 18th century people living in Wallonia under the HRE or Netherlands, speaking French and being Catholic? What are they? How would they identify themselves? Or people born in Thessaloniki/Salonika/Solun in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th century, being Orthodox and Slav? Or people speaking Polish but considering themselves German in post-WWI disputed territories? Or Baltic Germans living in Russia for generations? Or the family in Macedonia where 3 brothers considered themselves Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian respectively.
Depending on the point in time, locality and even individuals, people would identify with their religion, main language, local area, monarch, nation state first. Or a combination of all of the above. How would you represent that sort of wild variety on a 2D map?
>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)
This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...
Eh, not really true. Not only is that missing slavic languages, there are edge cases like Romania and Albania, which are surrounded by Slavic speakers. There's also Greece, and even more wild, Hungary which is from an entirely separate language family alltogether.
In a sense, all of the countries today have more in common with each other than with a given unique culture they subsumed (or in some cases annihilated). Putting all focus on separating the former and largely ignoring the latter is a narrow take on the meaning of “history”, and a more specific term (perhaps “political history”) seems more fitting.
For example, Russia did not naturally expand into a vacant spot eastward, despite resources such as Timemap.org perpetuating an image of peacefully walking into vast empty lands rather than annexing with a heavy dose of brutality, deadly smallpox, forced conversion to Christianity, and just plain old mass murder the territories where a range of cultures (Yakuts, Nenets, etc.) lived for centuries prior to that (or to Russia actually existing as such for that matter).