Proto-Indo-European homeland

The Proto-Indo-European homeland according to the steppe hypothesis (dark green) and the present-day distribution of Indo-European languages in Eurasia (light green).

The Proto-Indo-European homeland (or Indo-European homeland) is the prehistoric urheimat of the Indo-European languages – the region where the reconstructed common ancestor of those languages, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), was originally spoken.

There is no scientific consensus on when or where PIE was spoken. Currently, the majority of Indo-European specialists support the steppe hypothesis, which puts the PIE homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 4,000 BCE. The major alternative theory is the Anatolian hypothesis, which puts it in Anatolia around 8,000 BCE, but has lost support due to the explanatory limitations of this theory. A notable third possibility are proposals for a more southern homeland or influences, including the Armenian hypothesis.

Many other homelands have been proposed in the past, including the Paleolithic continuity theory, the Indigenous Aryans and Out of India theory, and more northern origins; some were once widely accepted by scholars, while others have only ever been considered fringe theories.

The search for the homeland of the Indo-Europeans dates back to the late 18th century, and has drawn upon historical linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology and, more recently, human population genetics.

Hypotheses

Mainstream hypotheses

The Steppe theory and the Anatolian hypothesis are "the two leading competitors," while there is also some interest in possible Near eastern origins. The majority of Indo-European specialists support the steppe hypothesis, though critical issues remain to be clarified. The three models are:

• The steppe hypothesis, a revised version of the "Kurgan hypothesis", that places the PIE homeland in the Pontic steppe around 4,000 BCE.
• The Anatolian hypothesis, that places the pre-PIE homeland in Anatolia around 8,000 BCE, and the homeland of Proto-Indo-European proper in the Balkans around 5000 BCE.
• The Near eastern model, most notably the Armenian hypothesis, as proposed by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, and connected to archaeological support by Grogoriev;

Minority and historical hypotheses

In addition to these theories, a number of other theories have been proposed, most of which have little or no academic currency today:

• the Out of India theory, with a homeland in India in the 6th millennium BCE;
• a 6th millennium BCE or later origin in Northern Europe, according to Lothar Kilian's and, especially, Marek Zvelebil's models of a broader homeland;
• The Paleolithic Continuity Theory, with an origin before the 10th millennium BCE
• Nikolai Trubetzkoy's theory of Sprachbund origin of Indo-European traits;

Development and theoretical considerations

Traditionally homelands of linguistic families are proposed based on evidence from comparative linguistics coupled with evidence of historical populations and migrations from archeology. Through comparative linguistics it is possible to reconstruct the vocabulary found in the proto-language, and in this way achieve knowledge of the cultural, technological and ecological context that the speakers in habited. Such a context can then be compared with archeological evidence. Today, biological evidence from DNA samples is increasingly becoming used in the study of ancient population movements. Asya Pereltsvaig notes that "ancient (and to some degree, modern) DNA, coupled with archeological record, can provide 'evidence about processes of migration' of preliterate populations [...] [A]ny theory of Indo-European language dispersal must be compatible with such migration history."

Steppe hypothesis

See also: Indo-European migrations

Gimbutas' Kurgan hypothesis

Main article: Kurgan hypothesis

In the 1970s, a mainstream consensus had emerged among Indo-Europeanists in favour of the "Kurgan hypothesis" placing the Indo-European homeland in the Pontic steppe of the Chalcolithic period. This was not least due to the influence of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, edited by J. P. Mallory, that focused on the ideas of Marija Gimbutas, and offered some improvements.

Gimbutas had created a modern variation on the traditional invasion theory (the Kurgan hypothesis, after the kurgans, burial mounds, of the Eurasian steppes) in which the Indo-Europeans were a nomadic tribe in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia and expanded on horseback in several waves during the 3rd millennium BCE. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the horse. Leaving archaeological signs of their presence (see battle-axe people), they subjugated the peaceful European Neolithic farmers of Gimbutas's Old Europe. As Gimbutas's beliefs evolved, she put increasing emphasis on the patriarchal, patrilinear nature of the invading culture, sharply contrasting it with the supposedly egalitarian, if not matrilinear culture of the invaded, to the point of formulating essentially a feminist archaeology. Her interpretation of Indo-European culture found genetic support in remains from the Neolithic culture of Scandinavia, where DNA from bone remains in Neolithic graves indicated that the megalith culture was either matrilocal or matrilineal, as the people buried in the same grave were related through the women. Likewise, there is a tradition of remaining matrilineal traditions among the Picts.

Archeology

The Gimbutas-Mallory Kurgan hypothesis seeks to identifies the source of the Indo-European language expansion as a succession of migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, originating in the area encompassed by the Sredny Stog culture (ca. 4500 BCE). J. P. Mallory, dating the migrations later, to around 4000 BCE, and putting less insistence on their violent or quasi-military nature, essentially modified Gimbutas' theory making it compatible with a less gender-political narrative. David Anthony, focusing mostly on the evidence for the domestication of horses and the presence of wheeled vehicles, came to regard specifically the Yamna culture, which replaced the Sredny Stog culture around 3500 BC, as the most likely candidate for the Proto-Indo-European speech community.

Vocabulary

The core element of the steppe hypothesis is the identification of the proto-Indo-European culture as a nomadic pastoralist society, that did not practice intensive agriculture. This identification rests on the fact that vocabulary related to cows, and to horses and horsemanship and wheeled vehicles can be reconstructed for all branches of the family, whereas agricultural vocabulary tends not to be reconstructable suggesting a gradual adoption of agriculture through contact with non-Indo-Europeans. When this evidence and reasoning is accepted, the search for the Indo-European proto-culture has to involve searching for the earliest introduction of domesticated horses and chariots into Europe.

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. Proponents of the Steppe hypothesis have argued this to be highly unlikely and to break with the established principles for reasonable assumptions when explaining linguistic comparative data.

Another source of evidence for the steppe hypothesis is the presence of what appears to be many shared loanwords between Uralic languages and proto-Indoeuropean, suggesting that these languages were spoken in adjacent areas. This would have had to take place a good deal further north than the Anatolian or Near Eastern scenarios would allow.

Genetics

Root populations

See also: Origins of Yamna culture and Yamna component in European genes

The proto-Indo-Europeans, c.q. the Yamnaya people, seem to have been a mix from eastern European hunter-gatherers and Caucasus hunter-gatherers c.q. Iran Chalcolithic people with a Caucasian hunter-gatherer component.

According to Jones et al. (2015), Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) "genomes significantly contributed to the Yamnaya steppe herders who migrated into Europe ~3,000 BC, supporting a formative Caucasus influence on this important Early Bronze age culture. CHG left their imprint on modern populations from the Caucasus and also central and south Asia possibly marking the arrival of Indo-Aryan languages."

According to Haak et al. (2015), "the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but from a population of Near Eastern ancestry." According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), "a population related to the people of the Iran Chalcolithic contributed ~43% of the abcestry of early Bronze Age populations of the steppe." According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), these Iranian Chacolithic people were a mixture of "the Neolithic people of western Iran, the Levant, and Caucasus Hunter Gatherers."

R1a

Haplogroup R1a is associated with the Kurgan culture and Transcaucasia. R1a1 shows a strong correlation with Indo-European languages of western Asia and eastern Europe, being most prevalent in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine and also observed in Pakistan, India and central Asia. The connection between Y-DNA R-M17 and the spread of Indo-European languages was first noted by T. Zerjal and colleagues in 1999. Ornella Semino and colleagues proposed a postglacial spread of the R1a1 gene during the Late Glacial Maximum, subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward. Spencer Wells suggests that the distribution and age of R1a1 points to an ancient migration corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion from the Eurasian steppe. More recently, R1a turned out to be split in two specific subclades, namely R1-Z282 which dominates in Eastern-Europe, and R1-Z93 which is found in south-Siberia and northern India. The two subclades split in the area of Transcaucasia, between the setppe and northern Iran.

From Yamna to Corded Ware

In 2015 researchers reported on a DNA analysis of 94 ancient skeletons mostly 8,000–3,000 years old from Central Europe and Russia. They found that there was a major migration of Yamna culture people who entered Central Europe from the North Pontic-Caspian steppe about 4,500 years ago and whose DNA spread widely throughout Europe. They traced the majority of the genetic ancestry of skeletons from the northern European Corded ware culture to the Yamnaya populaiton. They concluded that this massive influx of Yamnaya herders provides support for the origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages in Europe.

From Corded Ware to Andronovo

According to Keyser et al. (2009) out of ten human male remains assigned to the Andronovo horizon from the Krasnoyarsk region, nine possessed the R1-M17 (R1a1a) Y-chromosome haplogroup and one C haplogroup (xC3), while 90% of the Bronze Age period mtDNA haplogroups were of west Eurasian origin. The study also determined that at least 60% of the individuals overall had light hair and blue or green eyes. Keyser et al. (2009) also found R1a in a "Scytho-Siberian specimen from the Sebÿstei site in the Altaï Republic (Central Asia) dated from the middle of the Wfth century BC."

Haak et al. (2015) found that the Andronovo-culture was genetically closely related to the Corded Ware culture, and concluded that the Andronovo culture developed from the eastern part of the Corded Ware culture.

Anatolian hypothesis

Main article: Anatolian hypothesis

See also: Indo-Hittite

Map showing the Neolithic expansion from the seventh to fifth millennium BC.

Theory

The main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis is the Anatolian hypothesis advanced by Colin Renfrew in 1987. It states that the Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BCE with the Neolithic advance of farming (wave of advance). 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.

According to Renfrew (2004), the spread of Indo-European proceeded in the following steps:

• Around 6500 BC: Pre-Proto-Indo-European, located in Anatolia, splits into Anatolian and Archaic Proto-Indo-European, the language of those Pre-Proto-Indo-European farmers who migrate to Europe in the initial farming dispersal. Archaic Proto-Indo-European languages occur in the Balkans (Starčevo-Körös-Cris culture), in the Danube valley (Linear Pottery culture), and possibly in the Bug-Dniestr area (Eastern Linear pottery culture).
• Around 5000 BC: Archaic Proto-Indo-European splits into Northwestern Indo-European (the ancestor of Italic, Celtic, and Germanic), located in the Danube valley, Balkan Proto-Indo-European (corresponding to Gimbutas' Old European culture), and Early Steppe Proto-Indo-European (the ancestor of Tocharian).

Reacting to criticism, Renfrew revised his proposal to the effect of taking a pronounced Indo-Hittite position. Renfrew's revised views place only Pre-Proto-Indo-European in 7th millennium BC Anatolia, proposing as the homeland of Proto-Indo-European proper the Balkans around 5000 BC, explicitly identified as the "Old European culture" proposed by Marija Gimbutas. He thus still situates the original source of the Indo-European language family in Anatolia around 7000 BC. Reconstructions of a Bronze Age PIE society based on vocabulary items like "wheel" do not necessarily hold for the Anatolian branch, which appears to have separated from PIE at an early stage, prior to the invention of wheeled vehicles.

Objections

Dating

The main objection to this theory is that it requires an unrealistically early date. 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. On lexico-cultural dating, Proto-Indo-European cannot be earlier than 4000 BC.

Farming

The idea that farming was spread from Anatolia in a single wave has been revised. Instead it appears to have spread in several waves by several routes, primarily from the Levant. The trail of plant domesticates indicates an initial foray from the Levant by sea. The overland route via Anatolia seems to have been most significant in spreading farming into south-east Europe.

Farming developed independently in the eastern Fertile cresent. Non-Indo-European languages appear to be associated with the spread of farming from the Near East into North Africa and the Caucasus. According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), farming developed independently both in the Levant and in the eastern Fertile Crescent. After this initial development, the two regions and the Caucasus interacted, and the chalcolithic north-west Iranian population appears to be a mixture of Iranian neolithic, Levant, and Caucasus hunter-gatherers. According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), "farmers related to those from Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia." They further note that ANI "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," which makes it unlikely that the Indo-European languages in India are derived from Anatolia.

Underhill et al. (2014/2015) found that two subclades of R1a dominate in two different regions, namely R1-Z282 in Eastern Europe, and R1-Z93 in southern Siberia and northern India. According to Underhill et al. (2014), the initial diversification of R1a took place in the vicinity of Iran, while Pamjav et al. (2012) think that R1a diversified within the Eurasian Steppes or the Middle East and Caucasus region. According to Underhill et al. (2014/2015) the diversification of Z93 and the "early urbanization within the Indus Valley also occurred at [5,600 years ago] and the geographic distribution of R1a-M780 (Figure 3d) may reflect this." Poznik et al. (2016) note that 'striking expansions' occurred within R1a-Z93 at ~4,500-4,000 years ago, which "predates by a few centuries the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation."

Mascarenhas et al. (2015) note that the expansion of Z93 from Transcaucasia into South Asia is compatible with "the archeological records of eastward expansion of West Asian populations in the 4th millennium BCE culminating in the socalled Kura-Araxes migrations in the post-Uruk IV period."

Alignment with Steppe-theory

According to Alberto Piazza "[i]t is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey." According to Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza, the Yamna-culture may have been derived from Middle Eastern Neolithic framers who migrated to the Pontic steppe and developed pastoral nomadism.:

...if the expansions began at 9,500 years ago from Anatolia and at 6,000 years ago from the Yamnaya culture region, then a 3,500-year period elapsed during their migration to the Volga-Don region from Anatolia, probably through the Balkans. There a completely new, mostly pastoral culture developed under the stimulus of an environment unfavorable to standard agriculture, but offering new attractive possibilities. 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.

Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is "some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East":

... while we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. 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.

Other models

Eastern Anatolia - Transcaucasia - Iran - Caspian Sea

The Yamna-culture existed in close interaction with contemporary cultures, including the Maykop culture and the Kura-Araxes culture. The rise and development of these cultures is related to the vanishing power of the Uruk-culture, which left a vacuum in the Caucasus, but also to long-trade networks, for which the Maykop-culture formed a hub.

Eastern Anatolia, southern Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia

Armenian hypothesis

Main article: Armenian hypothesis

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov held that the Urheimat was south of the Caucasus, specifically, "within eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia" in the fifth to fourth millennia BC. Their proposal was based on a disputed theory of glottal consonants in PIE. According to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, PIE words for material culture objects imply contact with more advanced peoples to the south, the existence of Semitic loan-words in PIE, Kartvelian (Georgian) borrowings from PIE, some contact with Sumerian, Elamite and others. However given that the glottalic theory never caught on, and there was little archeological support the Gamkredlize and Ivanov theory did not gain support, untill Renfrew's anatolian theory revived aspects of their proposal.

Gamkredilze and Ivanov proposed that the Greeks moving west across Anatolia to their present location, a northward movement of some IE speakers that brought them into contact with the Finno-Ugric languages and suggest that the kurgan area, or better “Black Sea and Volga steppe” was a secondary homeland from which the western IE languages emerged.

A 2015 genetic study by Haak et al. (2015:137) argues that their findings of gene flow of a population that shares traits with modern day Armenians into the Yamnaya pastoralist culture lends support to the Armenian hypothesis, while Lazaridis et al. (2016) state that "farmers related to those from Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe."

Mesopotamian influences

According to Konstantine Pitskhelauri, Uruk migrants moved to the southern and northern Caucasus, and were instrumental in the development of the Maykop and the Kura-Araxes culture, which were contemporary with the Yamna-culture.

Sogdiana hypothesis

The "Sogdiana hypothesis" of Johanna Nichols places the homeland in the 4th or 5th millennium BCE to the east of the Caspian Sea, in the area of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana.

Caspian Sea and northwestern Iran

Bernard Sergent associates the Indo-European language family with certain archaeological cultures in Southern Russia, and he reconstructs an Indo-European religion (relying on the method of Georges Dumézil). He writes that the lithic assemblage of the first Kurgan culture in Ukraine (Sredni Stog II), which originated from the Volga and South Urals, recalls that of the Mesolithic-Neolithic sites to the east of the Caspian sea, Dam Dam Chesme II and the cave of Djebel. Thus, he places the roots of the Gimbutas' Kurgan cradle of Indo-Europeans in a more southern cradle, and adds that the Djebel material is related to a Paleolithic material of Northwestern Iran, the Zarzian culture, dated 10,000-8,500 BC, and in the more ancient Kebarian of the Near East. He concludes that more than 10,000 years ago the Indo-Europeans were a small people grammatically, phonetically and lexically close to Semitic-Hamitic populations of the Near East.

Out of India theory

Main article: Indigenous Aryans

The languages of northern India and Pakistan, including Hindi and the historically and culturally significant liturgical language Sanskrit, belong to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. The mainstream academic consensus is the Indo-Aryan migration theory: that the Indo-Aryan languages originated outside of the subcontinent, probably in the Central Asian steppes, and were brought to South Asia by a people commonly referred to as the "Aryans" in the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE. However, this idea has proved politically contentious, particularly amongst Hindu revivalists and Hindu nationalists. Objectors to the Indo-Aryan migration theory argue that the Aryans were indigenous to India, and some, such as Koenraad Elst and Shrikant Talageri, have proposed that Proto-Indo-European itself originated in northern India, either with or shortly before the Indus Valley Civilisation. This "Out of India" theory is not regarded as plausible in mainstream scholarship.

Baltic hypothesis

Lothar Kilian and Marek Zvelebil have proposed a 6th millennium BCE or later origin in Northern Europe. The Steppe theory is compatible with the argument that the PIE homeland must have been larger, because the "Neolithic creolisation hypothesis" allows the Pontic-Caspian region to have been part of PIE territory.

Palaeolithic Continuity Theory

Main article: Paleolithic Continuity Theory

See also

• Anatolian hypothesis
• Armenian hypothesis
• Bronze Age Europe
• Indo-European studies
• Neolithic Europe
• Old European culture
• Proto-Indo-European language
• Proto-Indo-Europeans
• Urheimat
• Indo-European migrations

Sources

• Anthony, David W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-05887-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Atkinson, Quentin; Geoff Nicholls, David Welch, Russell Gray (2005) From words to dates: water into wine, mathemagic or phylogenetic inference? Transactions of the Philological Society, 103 (2):193–219.
• Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (2000). Genes, peoples, and languages. Farrar Straus & Giroux. ISBN 0-86547-529-6.
• Haak, Wolfgang; Lazaridis, Iosif; Patterson, Nick; Rohland, Nadin; Mallick, Swapan; Llamas, Bastien; Brandt, Guido; Nordenfelt, Susanne; Harney, Eadaoin (2015), "Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe", Nature, 522 (7555): 207–211, doi:10.1038/nature14317
• Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language by E. F. K. Koerner, University of Ottawa On linguistics and the search for the original Indo-European homeland
• Lazaridis (2016b), Supplementary Information. The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers
• Mallory, J.P. (1989), In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth, London: Thames & Hudson.
• Mallory, James P. (1997), "The homelands of the Indo-Europeans", in Blench, Roger; Spriggs, Matthew (eds.), Archaeology and Language, vol. I: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-11760-7.
• Mallory, J. P.; Adams, D. Q. (2006), "Origins: The Never-Ending Story", The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, OUP Oxford, pp. 442–463, ISBN 9780199287918
• Mallory, J.P. (2013), "Twenty-first century clouds over Indo-European homelands" (PDF), Journal of Language Relationship 9 (2013)
• Mascarenhas, Desmond D.; Raina, Anupuma; Aston, Christopher E.; Sanghera, Dharambir K., "Genetic and Cultural Reconstruction of the Migration of an Ancient Lineage", BioMed Research International. Volume 2015, Article ID 651415, 16 pages {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |yar= ignored (help)
• Pamjav, Horolma; Fehér, Tibor; Németh, Endre; Pádár, Zsolt (2012), "Brief communication: new Y-chromosome binary markers improve phylogenetic resolution within haplogroup R1a1", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 149 (4): 611–615, doi:10.1002/ajpa.22167, PMID 23115110
• Pereltsvaig, Asya; Lewis, Martin W. (2015), "Searching for Indo-European origins", The Indo-European Controversy, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9781107054530
• Piazza, Alberto; Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi (2006). "Diffusion of genes and languages in human evolution". Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Evolution of Language. pp. 255–266.
• Poznik (2016), "Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences", Nature genetics, doi:10.1038/ng.3559
• Underhill, Peter A. (2015), "The phylogenetic and geographic structure of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a", European Journal of Human Genetics, 23: 124–131, doi:10.1038/ejhg.2014.50
• Wells, Spencer; Read, Mark (2002). The journey of man: a genetic odyssey. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-11532-0.

External links

• Indo-European family tree, showing Indo-European languages and sub branches

Armenian hypothesis

• Publications by Stanislav Grigoriev
• Giacomo Benedett, Can we finally identify the real cradle of Indo-Europeans?
• PeopleOfFar, The Armenian Plateau Hypothesis Gains In Plausibility