Did You Know : Proximity Between Lithuanian and Indo-European Roots

I've recently had the opportunity to take a Lithuanian hitch-hiker. He was very savvy about linguistics and told me his mothertongue Lithuanian had a particularity: it has the closest proximity with older indo-european languages and with Sanskrit.
According to him, people who were interested in Sanskrit and linguistics were keen on learning Lithuanian. I didn't know about that, but Wikipedia seems to confirm.