This might possibly be the essay you refer to:
https://archive.is/20240311220449/https://www.nytimes.com/19...
https://archive.is/20240311220449/https://www.nytimes.com/19...
I find it amusing that we can reconstruct that PIE speakers had a verb for "to get high", but we can't reconstruct their noun for "bear", because it was taboo: speaking of the bear was like speaking of the devil, and so all we know are all the different ways the different languages chose to talk about the bear without saying its name.