How Are Proto-Languages Reconstructed From Ancient Languages?
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Mostly by looking for the common factors of all their known descendant languages.
You can find common shifts of sounds and reverse them to find a propable common ancestor of all the languages you have material from.
For example the word “two” has this look in different languages that all have indo-european as their ancestor:
dān dýō dvā́ du duō dau twai erkow wu dŭv dù dû
From that we can derive the original has propably started with a D and followed up with a W/Uo sounding part. We can take other words to find common rules of how a certain language diverged from previous sounds to reconstruct it to be *d(u)wóh.
We can also follow trends backwards. Inflexion for example (the bending of words based on the grammatical situation) has reduced in most languages over centuries (the older a text the more inflexions the language involves), therefore we can assume it was widely used in the unknown parent language, as certainly 20 different languages didn’t randomly start to do it at the same time without knowing about each other. (Also proto-indoeuropean example)
I’ll give you an example:
Words that in Spanish start with the letter c, usually start with the letter h in English. Think casa and house. They’re cognates. This is because words that used to start with a c changed to start with an h in English, but not in Spanish.
Now look at the word computer. In Spanish, it’s computadora. Since it starts with C in both words, the word was probably invented after English and Spanish diverged into different languages. The Germanic and Romance language groups split apart around the year 1000 BC. From this we can assume that the people who lived in the year 1000 BC probably didn’t have computers.
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