1.4.1. The search for the Urheimat or ‘Homeland’ of the prehistoric Proto-Indo-Europeans has developed as an archaeological quest along with the linguistic research looking for the reconstruction of the proto-language.

NOTE. According to A. Scherer’s Die Urheimat der Indogermanen (1968), summing up the views of various authors from the years 1892-1963, still followed by mainstream Indo-European studies today, “Based upon the localization of later languages such as Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian, a swathe of land in southern Russia north of the Black Sea is often proposed as the native area of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European” (Meier-Brügger, 2003).

Photo of a Kurgan ( Archaeology Magazine).

1.4.2. The Kurgan hypothesis was introduced by Marija Gimbutas in 1956 in order to combine archaeology with linguistics in locating the origins of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. She named the set of cultures in question “Kurgan” after their distinctive burial mounds and traced their diffusion into Eastern and Northern Europe.

1.4.3. According to her hypothesis, PIE speakers were probably a nomadic tribe of the Pontic-Caspian steppe that expanded in successive stages of the Kurgan culture and three successive “waves” of expansion during the 3^rd millennium BC:

·   Kurgan I, Dnieper/Volga region, earlier half of the 4^th millennium BC. Apparently evolving from cultures of the Volga basin, subgroups include the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures.

·   Kurgan II–III, latter half of the 4^th millennium BC. Includes the Sredny Stog culture and the Maykop culture of the northern Caucasus. Stone circles, early two-wheeled chariots, anthropomorphic stone stelae of deities.

·   Kurgan IV or Pit Grave culture, first half of the 3^rd millennium BC, encompassing the entire steppe region from the Ural to Romania.

o    Wave 1, predating Kurgan I, expansion from the lower Volga to the Dnieper, leading to coexistence of Kurgan I and the Cucuteni culture. Repercussions of the migrations extend as far as the Balkans and along the Danube to the Vinča and Lengyel cultures in Hungary.

o    Wave 2, mid 4^th millennium BC, originating in the Maykop culture and resulting in advances of “kurganized” hybrid cultures into northern Europe around 3000 BC – Globular Amphora culture, Baden culture, and ultimately Corded Ware culture.

o   

Hypothetical Homeland or Urheimat of the first PIE speakers, from 4500 BC onwards. The Yamna (Pit Grave) culture lasted from ca. 3600 till 2200 BC. In this time the first wagons appeared. People were buried with their legs flexed, a position which remained typical for the Indo-Europeans for a long time. The burials were covered with a mound, a kurgan. During this period, from 3600 till 3000 IE II split up into Pre-IE III and Pre-Proto-Anatolian. From ca.3000 B.C on, Late PIE dialects began to differentiate and spread by 2500 westward (Europe’s Indo-European), southward (Proto-Greek) and eastward (Proto-Aryan, Pre-Proto-Tocharian).

Wave 3, 3000-2800 BC, expansion of the Pit Grave culture beyond the steppes; appearance of characteristic pit graves as far as the areas of modern Romania, Bulgaria and eastern Hungary.

NOTE. On the Kurgan hypothesis, Mallory & Adams (2006) say that “[t]he opposite method to a retrospective approach is a prospective approach where one starts with a given archaeological phenomenon and tracks its expansion. This approach is largely driven by a theory connected with the mechanism by which the Indo-European languages must have expanded. Here the trajectory need not be the type of family tree that an archaeologist might draw up but rather some other major social phenomenon that can move between cultures. For example, in both the nineteenth century and then again in the later twentieth century, it was proposed that Indo-European expansions were associated with the spread of agriculture. The underlying assumption here is that only the expansion of a new more productive economy and attendant population expansion can explain the widespread expansion of a language family the size of the Indo-European. This theory is most closely associated with a model that derives the Indo-Europeans from Anatolia about the seventh millennium BC from whence they spread into south-eastern Europe and then across Europe in a Neolithic ‘wave of advance’.

A later alternative mechanism is the spread of more pastoral societies who exploited the horse (and later the chariot) and carried a new language across Europe and Asia from the fourth millennium bc onwards. The underlying assumption here is that the vector of Indo-European language spread depended on a new, more aggressive social organization coupled with a more mobile economy and superior transportation technology. As this theory sets the homeland in the steppelands north of the Black and Caspian seas among different cultures that employed barrows for their burials (Russian kurgan), it is generally termed the Kurgan theory.

Although the difference between the Wave of Advance and Kurgan theories is quite marked, they both share the same explanation for the expansion of the Indo-Iranians in Asia (and there are no fundamental differences in either of their difficulties in explaining the Tocharians), i.e. the expansion of mobile pastoralists eastwards and then southwards into Iran and India. Moreover, there is recognition by supporters of the Neolithic theory that the ‘wave of advance’ did not reach the peripheries of Europe (central and western Mediterranean, Atlantic and northern Europe) but that these regions adopted agriculture from their neighbours rather than being replaced by them.

The Manual de Lingüística Indoeuropea (Adrados, Bernabé, Mendoza, 1998) makes a summary of main linguistic facts, supported by archaeological finds: “Remember the recent date of the ‘cristalization’ of European languages. ‘Old European’ [=North-West Indo-European], from which they derive, is an already evolved language, with opposition masculine/feminine, and must be located in time ca. 2000 BC or before. Also, one must take into account the following data: the existence of Tocharian, related to IE IIIb [=Northern PIE], but far away to the East, in the Chinese Turkestan; the presence of IE IIIb [=Graeco-Aryan] languages to the South of the Carpathian Mountains, no doubt already in the 3^rd millennium (the ancestors of Thracian, Iranian, Greek speakers); differentiation of Hittite and Luwian, within the Anatolian group, already ca. 2000 BC, in the documents of Kültepe, what means that Common Anatolian must be much older.

NOTE. Without taking on account archaeological theories, linguistic data reveals that:

a)      IE IIIb, located in Europe and in the Chinese Turkestan, must come from an intermediate zone, with expansion into both directions.

b)      IE IIIa, which occupied the space between Greece and the Northwest of India, communicating both Paeninsulas through the languages of the Balkans, Ukraine and Northern Caucasus, the Turkestan and Iran, must also come from some intermediate location. Being a different linguistic group, it cannot come from Europe or the Russian Steppe, where Ural-Altaic languages existed.

c)       Both groups have been in contact secondarily, taking on account the different ‘recent’ isoglosses in the contact zone.

d)      The more archaic Anatolian must have been isolated from the more evolved IE; and that in some region with easy communication with Anatolia.

(…) Only the Steppe North of the Caucasus, the Volga river and beyond can combine all possibilities mentioned: there are pathways that go down into Anatolia and Iran through the Caucasus, through the East of the Caspian Sea, the Gorgan plains, and they can migrate from there to the Chinese Turkestan, or to Europe, where two ways exist: to the North and to the South of the Carpathian mountains.

NOTE. For Kortlandt (1989), too, “Starting from the linguistic evidence (…) The best candidate for the original IE homeland is the territory of the Sredny Stog culture in the eastern Ukraine”.

Phase 1 IE II     Phase 2 IE IIIb   IE IIIa   Phase 3 IE IIIb IE IIIa

Jkfghjfghjdghjdfhdfhdfjhfghkfk rjtyjdghj

 

Anat.

 

 

 

West IE   Bal.-Sla.

                        Northern horde                                                         Tocharian

 

Gk.-Thrac.   Arm.   Ind.-Ira.

 

 

                                                                             Southern Horde

    

Germanic        Bal.-Sla.

                            Northern Horde

Cel.

Ita.

Indo-Iranian

Thr. Arm.  Gk.

I.-I.

 

 

 

 

                                                                                       Southern Horde

These linguistic data, presented in a diagram, are supported by strong archaeological arguments: they have been defended by Gimbutas 1985 against Gamkrelidze-Ivanov (…) This diagram proposes three phases. In the first one, IE II [=Middle PIE] became isolated, and from it Anatolian emerged, being first relegated to the North of the Caucasus, and then crossing into the South: there must Common Anatolian be located. Note that there is no significant temporal difference with the other groups; it happens also that the first IE wave into Europe was older. It is somewhere to the North of the people that later went to Anatolia that happened the great revolution that developed IE III [=Late PIE], the ‘common language’.

The following phases refer to that common language. The first is that one that saw both IE III B [=Northern IE] (to the North) and IE III A [=Southern IE] (to the South), the former being fragmented in two groups, one that headed West and one that migrated to the East. That is a proof that somewhere in the European Russia a common language III B emerged; to the South, in Ukraine or in the Turkestan, IE III A.

The second phase continues the movements of both branches, that launched waves to the South, but that were in contact in some moments, arising isoglosses that unite certain languages of the IE IIIa group (first Greek, later Iranian, etc.) with those of the rearguard of IE IIIb (especially Baltic and Slavic, also Italic and Germanic)”.

Distribution of haplotypes R1b (light color) for Eurasiatic Paleolithic and R1a (dark color) for Yamna expansion; black represents other haplogroups.

Cavalli-Sforza and Alberto Piazza argue that Renfrew (v.i.) and Gimbutas reinforce rather than contradict each other, stating 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”.

NOTE. The genetic record cannot yield any direct information as to the language spoken by these groups. The current interpretation of genetic data suggests a strong genetic continuity in Europe; specifically, studies of mtDNA by Bryan Sykes show that about 80% of the genetic stock of Europeans originated in the Paleolithic.

Spencer Wells suggests that the origin, distribution and age of the R1a1 haplotype points to an ancient migration, possibly corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion across the Eurasian steppe around 3000 BC, stating that “there is nothing to contradict this model, although the genetic patterns do not provide clear support either”.

NOTE. R1a1 is most prevalent in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, and is also observed in Pakistan, India and central Asia. R1a1 is largely confined east of the Vistula gene barrier and drops considerably to the west. The spread of Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup R1a1 has been associated with the spread of the Indo-European languages too. The mutations that characterize haplogroup R1a occurred ~10,000 years bp.

Haplogroup R1a1, whose lineage is thought to have originated in the Eurasian Steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, is therefore associated with the Kurgan culture, as well as with the postglacial Ahrensburg culture which has been suggested to have spread the gene originally.

The present-day population of R1b haplotype, with extremely high peaks in Western Europe and measured up to the eastern confines of Central Asia, are believed to be the descendants of a refugium in the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain) at the Last Glacial Maximum, where the haplogroup may have achieved genetic homogeneity. As conditions eased with the Allerød Oscillation in about 12000 BC, descendants of this group migrated and eventually recolonised all of Western Europe, leading to the dominant position of R1b in variant degrees from Iberia to Scandinavia, so evident in haplogroup maps.

NOTE. High concentrations of Mesolithic or late Paleolithic YDNA haplogroups of types R1b (typically well above 35%) and I (up to 25%), are thought to derive ultimately of the robust Eurasiatic Cro Magnoid homo sapiens of the Aurignacian culture, and the subsequent gracile leptodolichomorphous people of the Gravettian culture that entered Europe from the Middle East 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, respectively.

1.5.1. A common development of new hypotheses has been to revise the Three-Stage assumption. It is actually not something new, but the come back to more traditional views, reinterpreting the new findings of the Hittite scripts, trying to insert Anatolian into the old, static PIE concept.

1.5.2. The most known new alternative theory concerning PIE is the Glottalic theory. It assumes that Proto-Indo-European was pronounced more or less like Armenian, i.e. instead of PIE *p, *b, *b^h, the pronunciation would have been *p’, *p, *b, and the same with the other two voiceless-voiced-voiced aspirated series of consonants. The IE Urheimat would have been then located in the surroundings of Anatolia, especially near Lake Urmia, in northern Iran, hence the archaism of Anatolian dialects and the glottalics found in Armenian.

NOTE. Those linguistic and archaeological findings are supported by Th. Gamkredlize-V. Ivanov (1990: “The early history of Indo-European languages”, Scientific American, where early Indo-European vocabulary deemed “of southern regions” is examined, and similarities with Semitic and Kartvelian languages are also brought to light. This theory has been criticized by Meid (1989)

1.5.3. Alternative theories include:

I. The European Homeland thesis maintains that the common origin of the IE languages lies in Europe. These theses are more or less driven by Archeological. A. Häusler (1981, 1986, 1992) continues to defend the hypothesis that places Indo-European origins in Europe, stating that all the known differentiation emerged in the continuum from the Rhin to the Urals.

NOTE. It has been traditionally located in 1) Lithuania and the surrounding areas, by R.G. Latham (1851) and Th. Poesche (1878: Die Arier. Ein Beitrag zur historischen Anthropologie, Jena); 2) Scandinavia, by K.Penka (1883: Origines ariacae, Viena); 3) Central Europe, by G. Kossinna (1902: “Die Indogermanische Frage archäologisch beantwortet”, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 34, pp. 161-222), P.Giles (1922: The Aryans, New York), and by linguist/archaeologist G. Childe  (1926: The Aryans. A Study of Indo-European Origins, London).

a. The Old European or Alteuropäisch Theory compares some old European vocabulary (especially river names), which would be older than the spread of Late PIE dialects through Northern Europe. It points out the possibility of an older, pre-IE III spread of IE, either of IE II or I or maybe some other Pre-IE dialect. It is usually related to the PCT and Renfrew’s NDT.

b. The Paleolithic Continuity Theory posits that the advent of IE languages should be linked to the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia from Africa in the Upper Paleolithic. The PCT proposes a continued presence of Pre-IE and non-IE peoples and languages in Europe from Paleolithic times and allowing for minor invasions and infiltrations of local scope, mainly during the last three millennia.

NOTE. There are some research papers concerning the PCT available at <http://www.continuitas.com/>.  Also, the PCT could in turn be connected with Frederik Kortlandt’s Indo-Uralic and Altaic studies <http://kortlandt.nl/publications/> – although they could also be inserted in Gimbutas’ early framework.

On the temporal relationship question, Mallory & Adams (2006): “How early a solution is admitted depends on individual decisions regarding the temporally most diagnostic vocabulary. That the vocabulary is clearly one reflecting at least a Neolithic economy and technology, i.e. domesticated plants and animals, ceramics, means that it cannot be set anywhere on this planet prior to c. 8000 BC. Although there are still those who propose solutions dating back to the Palaeolithic, these cannot be reconciled with the cultural vocabulary of the Indo-European languages. The later vocabulary of Proto-Indo- European hinges on such items as wheeled vehicles, the plough, wool, which are attested in Proto-Indo-European, including Anatolian. It is unlikely then that words for these items entered the Proto-Indo-European lexicon prior to about 4000 BC. This is not necessarily a date for the expansion of Indo-European since the area of Proto-Indo-European speech could have already been in motion by then and new items with their words might still have passed through the continuum undetected, i.e. treated as inheritances rather than borrowings. All that can be concluded is that if one wishes to propose a homeland earlier than about 4000 bc, the harder it is to explain these items of vocabulary”.

c. The PCT is, in turn, related to the theories of a Neolithic revolution causing the peacefully spreading of an older pre-IE language into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BC, with the advance of farming. It proposes that the dispersal (discontinuity) of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia.

NOTE. Reacting to criticism, Renfrew by 1999 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 Gimbutas.

As of 2005, Colin Renfrew seems to support the PCT designs and the usefulness of the Paleolithic assumptions. He co-authored a paper concluding: Our finding lends weight to a proposed Paleolithic ancestry for modern Europeans The above quotation coming as results of archaeogenetic research on mtDNA where 150 x greater N1a frequency was found. The first European farmers are descended from a European population who were present in Europe since the Paleolithic and not coming as a wave of Neolithic migration as proposed in Renfrew’s NDT.

Talking about these new (old) theories, Adrados (1998) makes an interesting remark about the relevance that is – wrongly – given to each new personal archaeological ‘revolutionary’ theory: “[The hypothesis of Colin Renfrew (1987)] is based on ideas about the diffusion of agriculture from Asia to Europe in [the 5^th millennium Neolithic Asia Minor], diffusion that would be united to that of Indo-Europeans; it doesn’t pay attention at all to linguistic data. The [hypothesis of Gamkrelidze-Ivanov (1980, etc.)], which places the Homeland in the contact zone between Caucasian and Semitic peoples, south of the Caucasus, is based on real or supposed lexical loans; it disregards morphological data altogether, too. Criticism of these ideas – to which people have paid too much attention – are found, among others, in Meid (1989), Villar (1991), etc.”.

II. Another hypothesis, contrary to the European ones, also mainly driven today by a nationalistic view, traces back the origin of PIE to Vedic Sanskrit, postulating that it is very pure, and that the origin of common Proto-Indo-European can thus be traced back to the Indus Valley Civilization of ca. 3000 BC.

NOTE. Such Pan-Sanskritism was common among early Indo-Europeanists, as Schlegel, Young, A. Pictet (1877: Les origines indoeuropéens, Paris) or Schmidt (who preferred Babylonia), but are now mainly supported by those who consider Sanskrit almost equal to Late Proto-Indo-European. For more on this, see S. Misra (1992: The Aryan Problem: A Linguistic Approach, Delhi), Elst’s Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate (1999), followed up by S.G. Talageri’s The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), both part of “Indigenous Indo-Aryan” viewpoint by N. Kazanas, the “Out of India” theory, with a framework dating back to the times of the Indus Valley Civilization.

III. The Black Sea deluge theory dates the origin of the expansion of IE dialects in the genesis of the Sea of Azov, ca. 5600 BC, which would in turn be related to the deluge myth, which would have remained in oral tails until its description in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, the Hindu Puranic story of Manu, through Deucalion in Greek mythology or Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This date is generally considered as rather early for the PIE spread under frameworks which include the Urheimat near the Black Sea.

NOTE. W.Ryan and W.Pitman published evidence that a massive flood through the Bosporus occurred about 5600 BC, when the rising Mediterranean spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosporus. The event flooded 155,000 km² of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west. This has been connected with the fact that some Early Modern scholars based on Genesis 10:5 had assumed that the ‘Japhetite’ languages (instead of the ‘Semitic’ ones) are rather the direct descendants of the Adamic language, having separated before the confusion of tongues, by which also Hebrew was affected. That was claimed by Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (18^th c.), who stated in her private revelations that the purest descendants of the Adamic language were the main Proto-Indo-European dialects, v.i.

1.6.1. Many higher-level relationships between PIE and other language families have been proposed. But these speculative connections are highly controversial. Perhaps the most widely accepted proposal is of an Indo-Uralic family, encompassing PIE and Proto-Uralic, a language from which Hunarian, Finnish, Estonian, Saami and a number of other languages belong. The evidence usually cited in favor of this is the proximity of the proposed Urheimaten for both of them, the typological similarity between the two languages, and a number of apparent shared morphemes.

NOTE. Other proposals, further back in time (and correspondingly less accepted), model PIE as a branch of Indo-Uralic with a Caucasian substratum; link PIE and Uralic with Altaic and certain other families in Asia, such as Korean, Japanese, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut (representative proposals are Nostratic and Joseph Greenberg’s Eurasiatic); etc.

1.6.2. Indo-Uralic or Uralo-Indo-European is therefore a hypothetical language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic (i.e. Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic). Most linguists still consider this theory speculative and its evidence insufficient to conclusively prove genetic affiliation.

NOTE. Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt supports a model of Indo-Uralic in which its speakers lived north of the Caspian Sea, and Proto-Indo-Europeans began as a group that branched off westward from there to come into geographic proximity with the Northwest Caucasian languages, absorbing a Northwest Caucasian lexical blending before moving farther westward to a region north of the Black Sea where their language settled into canonical Proto-Indo-European.

The problem with lexical evidence is to weed out words due to borrowing, because Uralic languages have been in contact with Indo-European languages for millennia, and consequently borrowed many words from them.

1.6.3. The most common arguments in favour of a relationship between Early PIE and Uralic are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as: