Interesting that they chose "bark" as one of the core lexical items. The earliest Indo-European languages didn't evolve in forested areas, but in steppe and desert areas stretching from the Black Sea steppes across Central Asia to the oasis towns of the desert of Western China, where early Indo-Europeans created a civilization. "Bark" wouldn't have been one of their vocabulary items. Only later, when the migrated west into the forests of Europe would they have devised a word for "bark".
This "Eurasiatic" language family was proposed by linguist Sergei Starostin as "Nostratic". He created a website mapping out the world's macro-families, and providing examples of vocabulary in the languages within each family for comparison purposes. This builds on work by anthropologists generations ago who first proposed similar language families. This really isn't news, and it's still controversial. Here's a link to Starostin's "Tower of Babel" website and its "Interactive Maps" (see menu on left side of page), which he created through collaborations with the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
The Tower of Babel
The Athabaskan Native American languages share some base words with one of the Siberian languages, Ket, and are included in Starostin's "Dene-Caucasian" language family. Athabaskan languages actually do share some core vocabulary items with Siberian Turkic languages, but those may have come into Turkic from Ket.
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