
Jacob A. answered 03/25/20
MA and BA in linguistics
If I recall correctly, Hittite had a distinction between animate and inanimate. Since Hittite is the earliest Indo-European language we know of, this has been taken as evidence that early Proto-Indo-European had animate and inanimate noun classes rather than the three genders that have been preserved in later Indo-European languages (masculine, feminine, and neuter), but the animacy system evolved into the gender system later.