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I second Prof. Foster's recommendation of the Ostler book, but let me add to that Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton 1997) for a thoughtful discussion of conditions under which cultures and languages spread.
While the linguistic diversity principle is often useful in determining homelands, there are notable cases where it doesn't work. The Caucasus is one of the most linguistically complex and dense regions in the world, with in the neighborhood of fifty languages representing at least seven distinct, unrelated language families. Looking just at the Indo-European languages spoken there, including members of the Slavic, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian branches, one might suppose the region to be the homeland for Indo-European, but few linguists have proposed that and there's good evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, the diversity principle simply doesn't work for a group like Romance because Latin was taken to the far reaches of the Roman Empire centuries before the speech of these regional Latins began to diverge markedly and become modern Romance.
There is a long tradition especially in Indo-European studies called Worter und Sachen (there should be an umlaut on the o of Worter, but the character match feature has stopped working). This school of thought, which flourished in the early 20th c., holds that a study of the etymology of the names of cultural artifacts in a language can provide evidence for the history of those languages and of their homeland. Unfortunately, words change not only form but meaning as well over time so that it's not always clear what a reconstructed form meant. However, this sort of evidence, together with other methods, has been of some use in determining homelands for such disparate groups as Uralic and Uto-Aztecan. If you would like to investigate further the work done on Indo-European homeland questions, I recommend JP Malory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans (Thames and Hudson 1991). For a well thought out survey of the problem, you might also read Edgar Polome's article Linguistic Paleontology in a book he edited titled Research Guide on Language Change (Mouton de Gruyter 1990).
This is a fascinating area of study, and a fascinating question.
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