Kalevi Wiik

He was best known for his controversial hypothesis about the effect of the Uralic contact influence on the creation of various Indo-European protolanguages in Northern Europe such as Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic.

Ludomir R. Lozny states, "Wiik's controversial ideas are rejected by the majority of the scholarly community, but they have attracted the enormous interest of a wider audience.

"[1] Wiik proposed[2] Indo-European origins in Southeast Europe by using linguistic, genetic, archaeological and anthropological data to support his hypotheses.

The inhabitants of South-East Europe (hypothesised to have spread from the Balkans) had adopted the Neolithic way of life of mixed farming and animal husbandry and were becoming economically more successful.

Only in the periphery of the European continent, in Iberia and in Northeastern Europe strong nuclei of hunters apparently adopted farming without being linguistically converted: their descendants are Basque- and Finnish-speakers.