Proto-Indo-European homeland
[1][2][3][4][5] A notable second possibility, which has gained renewed attention during the 2010s and 2020s due to aDNA research, is the Armenian hypothesis, which situates the homeland for archaic PIE ('Indo-Hittite') south of the Caucasus mountains.
[17] The methods used to establish the homeland have been drawn from the disciplines of historical linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology and, more recently, human population genetics.
It was proposed by linguists Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the early 1980s, postulating relationships between Indo-European and Caucasian languages based on the disputed glottalic theory and related to archaeological findings by Grogoriev.
Although it has attracted substantive attention and discussions, the datings it proposes are at odds with the linguistic timeframe for Proto-Indo-European,[2] and with genetic data which do not find evidence for Anatolian origins in the Indian gene pool.
[32] First, cognate words for "axle", "wheel", "wagon-pole", and "convey by vehicle" can be found in a number of Indo-European languages ranging from Irish to Tocharian, but not Anatolian.
In addition, the culture described in early poems such as Homer's – praise of warriors, feasting, reciprocal guest-friendship, and so on – more closely match what is known of the burial practices of the steppe peoples than the neolithic farmers.
The most recent DNA findings from ancient bones as well as modern people show that farmers whose ancestors originated in Anatolia did indeed spread across Europe from 6500 BCE onwards, eventually mixing with the existing hunter-gatherer population.
Using comparative linguistics it is possible to reconstruct the vocabulary found in the proto-language, and in this way achieve some knowledge of the cultural, technological and ecological context that the speakers inhabited.
Although some have proposed a common ancestor (the hypothetical Nostratic macrofamily), this is generally regarded as the result of intensive borrowing, which suggests that their homelands were located near each other.
[47] Subsequently, a number of authors performed a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of the IE languages (a mathematical method used for evolutionary biology to establish relationships between species).
The authors stated that this time-scale is consistent with secondary movements such as the expansion of the steppe peoples after 3000 BCE, which they suggest also played a role in the spread of Indo-European languages.
J. P. Mallory, dating the migrations to c. 4000 BCE, and having less insistence on their violent or quasi-military nature, essentially modified Gimbutas's theory making it compatible with a less gender-political narrative.
[2] Anthony describes the spread of cattle-raising from early farmers in the Danube Valley into the Ukrainian steppes in the 6th–5th millennium BCE, forming a cultural border with the hunter-gatherers[2] whose languages may have included archaic PIE.
[2] It plays the main role in Gimbutas's Kurgan hypothesis,[2] and coincides with the spread of early PIE across the steppes[2] and into the Danube valley (c. 4000 BCE),[2] resulting in the end of Old Europe.
[4] Responding to these arguments, proponents of the Anatolian hypothesis Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson have argued that the different branches could have independently developed similar vocabulary based on the same roots, creating the false appearance of shared inheritance – or alternatively, that the words related to wheeled vehicle might have been borrowed across Europe at a later date.
In 2000, Ornella Semino et al. proposed a postglacial (Holocene) period spread of the R1a1a haplogroup from north of the Black Sea during the time of the Late Glacial Maximum, which was subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward.
[55][obsolete source] In 2015, a large-scale ancient DNA study by Haak et al. published in Nature found evidence of a "massive migration" from the Pontic-Caspian steppe to central Europe that occurred about 4,500 years ago.
The expansion of agriculture from the Middle East would have diffused three language families: Indo-European toward Europe, Dravidian toward Pakistan and India, and Afro-Asiatic toward Arabia and North Africa.
[68] After the publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew has accepted the reality of migrations of populations speaking one or several Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppe towards Northwestern Europe.
[4] According to linguistic analysis, the Proto-Indo-European lexicon seems to include words for a range of inventions and practices related to the Secondary Products Revolution, which post-dates the early spread of farming.
[70] Furthermore, it has been objected, on impressionistic grounds, that it seems unlikely that close equivalences such as Hittite [eːsmi, eːsi, eːst͜si] = Sanskrit [ásmi, ási, ásti] ("I am, you are, he is") could have survived over such a long timescale as the Anatolian hypothesis requires.
[75] They further note that ANI (Ancestral North Indian) "can be modelled as a mix of ancestry related to both early farmers of western Iran and to people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe",[75] which makes it unlikely that the Indo-European languages in India are derived from Anatolia.
Our hypothesis is, therefore, that Indo-European languages derived from a secondary expansion from the Yamnaya culture region after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.
There is clearly some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe.
[78]Varying ideas have been proposed regarding the location of archaic PIE, including the Eurasian/Eastern European steppe, the Caucasus to the south, or a mixed origin derived from both regions.
"[note 11] Wang et al. argue that evidence for gene flow to the steppe allows for a possible Indo-European homeland south of the Caucasus mountains.
They argue that genetic evidence from the 'Southern Arc', an area which includes Anatolia, North Mesopotamia, Western Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Caucasus, allows the possibility of a West Asian homeland for the Proto-Indo-European language.
also Indo-European had already diverged rapidly into multiple major branches by ~7000 yr B.P., without a coherent non-Anatolian core, and Indo-Iranic has no close relationship with Balto-Slavic, weakening the case for it having spread via the steppe.
[109] Anthony also notes that the paternal lineages of the Yamnaya, which were rich in R1b, were related to those of earlier Eastern European hunter-gatherers, rather than those of southern or Caucasus peoples such as the Maykop.
Partly for these reasons, Anthony concludes that Bronze Age Caucasus groups such as the Maykop "played only a minor role, if any, in the formation of Yamnaya ancestry."
