The ancestors were practical people.
When linguists discovered that, by comparing words from daughter languages, they could reconstruct a vocabulary for a language from some 6000 years ago, predating the invention of writing, they were ecstatic.
In our understanding of the past, archaeological artifacts will take us only so far. To really understand how a culture thinks, we need to know what it says.
To the scholarly world's everlasting disappointment, what we can reconstruct of the Proto-Indo-European language really tells us very little about the ancestors' society, culture, or religion.
What we do know is that they had two words for, shall we say, “breaking wind.”
1. To break wind softly.
2. To break wind loudly.
The first root left no living descendant in modern English. (Make of that what you will.)
As for the second: well, speakers of English still *perd- to this day.
So the fact that the ancestors felt a need to make such a verbal distinction actually has something important to tell us about their culture after all.
It tells us that they were polite.