Short answers, pulled from the story.
The North Caucasian languages form a proposed family spoken across the northern Caucasus region containing between 34 and 38 distinct languages today. Linguists divide these tongues into two major branches known as Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian.
Sergei Starostin and Sergei Nikolaev published the North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary by Asterisk Press in Moscow in 1994. Their research argued that both language groups emerged from a common ancestor around five thousand years BCE.
Ubykh, a Northwest language, possessed 84 consonants according to linguistic records. Archi, spoken within the Northeast branch, is thought to contain 76 consonants.
J. Nichols presented an assessment at the 10th Biennial Non-Slavic Languages Conference held in Chicago during May 1997. She argued that long-range comparison techniques might yield unreliable results without stronger evidence.
An automated analysis released in October 2013 by Müller et al. used ASJP 4 data to map lexical similarities across the region. That study did not conclude whether shared words resulted from inheritance or mutual borrowing.