Wikipedia says "The reconstructed language is thought to have been originally spoken in a small area in about 7000–2000 BCE (estimates vary)", I also found more precise dates such as 4000 BCE, but I don't know how reliable these are.
I understand that no precise date can be known, but is there a scholarly consensus on a likely range?
Alright, I found an answer in Bakró-Nagy, Marianne, Johanna Laakso, and Elena Skribnik (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages (Oxford, 2022), specifically the chapter about Proto-Uralic (p. 57-58). Works from the 1970s and 1980s dated Proto-Uralic to 4000 BC, but more recent works, such as Kallio, P. (2006). Suomen kantakielten absoluuttista kronologiaa (which I can't read because it's in Finnish), give it a more recent date, between 3000 and 2000 BC.
