kurgan theory vs renfrew hypothesis

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On the Indo-European homeland

Apr 26, 2011 by Asya Pereltsvaig

Lately, I have been posting on the study by Dr. Atkinson from the University of Auckland, New Zealand on the origins on human language. He has also published recently another article (with Russell D. Gray) on the origins of the Indo-European language family.

As with the study on the origins of human language, Atkinson’s research published in Nature applies computational methods derived from evolutionary biology, this time to one of “the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics”, the problem of the Indo-European homeland. As J. P. Mallory once put it:

“One does not ask ‘where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where do they put it now?'”

Although there is no consensus on where exactly the speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived, the most commonly accepted theory since the 1970s remain the Kurgan Hypothesis, proposed in 1956 by a Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She was one of the first scholars to combine evidence from archeology and linguistics. Specifically, she proposed that the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a nomadic tribe in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia associated with what archaeologists identify as the “Kurgan culture”, so named after the distinctive Kurgan burial mounds in the Pontic steppe (flatland). According to this theory, speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread on horseback throughout the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 5,000 BCE and into Eastern Europe by the early 3rd millennium BCE.

One strong argument in favor of the Kurgan hypothesis is the fact that Proto-Uralic is the only non-Indo-European language whose lexicon appears to contain loanwords from Proto-Indo-European, such as the words * śata ‘hundred’ and * porćas ‘pig’. For such borrowing from Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Uralic, to be possible Proto-Indo-European must have been spoken in reasonable proximity to Proto-Uralic, which at least some scholars associate with the Pit-Comb Ware culture to the north of the Kurgan culture in the fifth millennium BCE.

But despite its mainstream status, the Kurgan Hypothesis has been challenged by various scholars throughout the years. Even a brief review of all (or most) competing theories will take us too far afield, so I will focus here on the main competitor of the Kurgan hypothesis, the Anatolian theory, advanced by Colin Renfrew, a British archaeologist and archeogeneticist.

Renfrew’s answers to both the “where” and “when” questions are different from Gimbutas’s. According to the Anatolian theory, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived before the people of the Kurgan culture, about 7,000 BCE, and their homeland was not in the Pontic steppes but further south, in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), from where they later diffused into Greece, Italy, Sicily, Corsica, the Mediterranean coast of France, Spain, and Portugal, while another group migrated along the fertile river valleys of the Danube and Rhine into Central and North Europe. This course of diffusion is correlated with the spread of agriculture, which can be traced through archaeological remains. One of the main problems facing this theory is the fact that ancient Asia Minor is known to have been inhabited by non-Indo-European people, such as Hattians (later replaced by speakers of Hittite, also an extinct language) and others.

The contribution of Gray and Atkinson’s study is in the additional evidence they provide for the Anatolian hypothesis based on their analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items that produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between 7,800 and 9,800 years ago (or about 5,800-7,800 BCE).

Yet the two theories, the Kurgan theory and the Anatolian theory, may prove not to be as mutually exclusive as they seem. This becomes especially true as genetic studies are bringing new elements (and new solutions!) to the puzzle. For example, Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Alberto Piazza have suggested that Colin Renfrew’s Anatolian Hypothesis and Marija Gimbutas’s Kurgan Hypothesis need not contradict each other: after all, it is possible -– and genetic studies seem to support this -– that the same people who originated in Asia Minor had first migrated to the area of the Pontic steppes and from there expanded into Central and Northern Europe. A 3,500-year period would have elapsed between the time of the Proto-Indo-European speakers’ sojourn in Anatolia and their appearance in the area of the Kurgans. While Colin Renfrew maintains that the Proto-Indo-Europeans in Anatolia were agriculturalists, it is possible that they could have reverted to a pastoral culture as an adaptation to the environment. Here is how Piazza & Cavalli-Sforza (2006) explain this:

“…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.”

Overall, the genetic findings to date provide the strongest support to Gimbutas’s model of Indo-European spread from the southern Russian steppe, and there is little evidence for a similarly massive migration of agriculturalists directly from the Asia Minor.

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An investigation of the beginnings of patriarchy in Europe is more than an intellectual exercise. Its path crosses the boundaries of archaeology, anthropology, gender studies, history, linguistics, mythology, genetics, among other disciplines, and inevitably leads to a constellation of assumptions, interpretations and beliefs about the origin story of European civilization. Patriarchy has been defined as the social arrangement in which men possess structural power by monopolizing high-status positions in important social, economic, legal, and religious institutions (Glick and Fiske 2000:373). As a designation of social structure, it is associated with patrilineal inheritance and a patrilocal system of residence. Patriarchy typically promotes warfare which further intensifies male dominance on every level of society (see Christ 1997:6062). While there is no universal consensus about exactly how and when full-fledged patriarchal institutions were first established in Europe, it is cle...

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“What's in a name?” asked Juliet of Romeo. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” A real-life Juliet probably would have spoken to Romeo in an obscure medieval Italian dialect rather than Shakespeare's English. Nevertheless, her word for the sweet-smelling flower would have shared the same linguistic root ( rosa , in modern Italian) as the English version does and indeed as many other languages spoken throughout Europe do— Rose , capitalized in German fashion, or the lowercase French rose . Croatian? An aromatic ruža . To the nearly 60,000 Scots who still speak the ancient Scottish Gaelic, this symbol of passionate love is a ròs .

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Because words and languages do not fossilize, the task of tracking their movements across time and space was left for more than a century to traditional linguists and a small number of archaeologists. Recently, however, the search for Indo-European origins has gone high tech, as biologists and experts in ancient DNA have gotten into the act. Armed with new theoretical and statistical approaches, these investigators have begun to transform linguistics from a paper-and-pencil exercise into a field that uses powerful computers and methods borrowed from evolutionary biology to trace language origins.

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You might think that this attempt to modernize linguistics would bring researchers closer to an understanding of where and when the Indo-European languages arose. But in many ways, the opposite has happened, and the question is in even greater dispute. Everyone agrees on one key point: the Indo-European languages descend from a common ancestor, a mother tongue called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. But as to why this particular language produced so many linguistic offspring or where it originated, there is no accord.

Researchers have fallen into two warring camps. One camp, which includes the majority of traditional linguists, argues that Central Asian nomads, who invented the wheel and domesticated the horse, spread the mother tongue throughout Europe and Asia beginning about 6,000 years ago. The other camp, led by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, credits early farmers from more than 500 miles to the south in what is now Turkey with disseminating the language at some point after they began spreading their agricultural know-how 8,500 years ago.

Over the years first one idea then another has had the upper hand. Evolutionary biologists published a series of studies in 2003 that concluded that the Indo-European family tree originated in the Middle East at least 8,000 years ago, based on the idea that the evolution of words can mimic the evolution of living organisms; their results are consistent with the farmer hypothesis. In the past year or two some linguists, archaeologists and geneticists struck back, using rival computational analyses and samples of DNA from ancient skeletons to support the nomad hypothesis. And so the pendulum continues to swing.

The Horse, of Course

Scholars did not have to wait for high-speed computers to recognize connections among the Indo-European languages. That realization dawned as early as the 1700s, after Europeans had begun to travel far afield. Some of the parallels among widely distributed tongues are now seen as dead giveaways. Thus, the Sanskrit and Latin words for “fire,” agní - and ignis , clearly indicate their Indo-European family ties.

By the 19th century, linguists were sure there must be a common ancestor for all Indo-European languages. “There was a sense of shock that the classical languages of European civilization sprang from the same source as Sanskrit, an exotic language spoken in India, on the other side of the world,” says David Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College and a fierce advocate of PIE's nomadic origin.

So linguists set about reconstructing this ancestral tongue. Sometimes this was not too difficult, especially if the original word had not changed unrecognizably. For example, linguists could take the English word “birch,” the German Birke , the Sanskrit bhūrjá and other Indo-European words for this slender tree and, by applying basic linguistic rules of language change, extrapolate backward to figure out that the PIE root was something like * bherh 1 ǵ - (the asterisk indicates that this is a reconstructed word for which there is no direct evidence). Other reconstructions are not as obvious. Thus, the PIE word for “horse”— áśva - in Sanskrit, híppos in Greek, equus in Latin and ech in Old Irish—was determined to be * h 1 éḱwo (the subscript 1 refers to a sound made in the back of the mouth).

But when some linguists tried to identify the peoples behind the language, things became trickier. These scholars began linking certain cultures with PIE, an approach called linguistic paleontology. They noticed that PIE contained many terms for domesticated animals, such as horses, sheep and cattle, and began postulating a pastoral Indo-European “homeland.”

That approach eventually led to trouble. In the early 20th century German prehistorian Gustaf Kossinna proposed that a group of Central European settlers, who created intricately engraved pottery called Corded Ware starting 5,000 years ago, were in fact the first Indo-Europeans. Kossinna argued that they later spread out of what is today Germany, carrying their language with them. That idea was music to the ears of the Nazis, who resurrected the term “Aryan” (a 19th-century term for Indo-Europeans), along with its connotations of racial superiority.

The Nazi endorsement gave Indo-European studies a bad name for many years. Many researchers give credit to Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist who died in 1994, for making the subject respectable again, starting in the 1950s. Gimbutas situated the origins of PIE in the so-called Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea. For her, the prime mover of PIE was the Copper Age Kurgan culture, which can first be identified in the archaeological record about 6,000 years ago. After a millennium of roaming the barren steppes—in which the nomads learned how to domesticate the horse—Gimbutas argued, they charged forth into Eastern and Central Europe, imposing their patriarchal culture as well as the strongly enunciated vowels and consonants of their native Indo-European language. More specifically, Gimbutas identified the Yamnaya people, who lived in the Pontic steppes between about 5,600 and 4,300 years ago, as the original PIE speakers.

Other researchers also found evidence to support such a view. In 1989 David Anthony began working in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, focusing on horse teeth that had been earlier excavated by Soviet archaeologists. Anthony and his colleagues confirmed previous suggestions that there was bit wear on teeth dated as early as 6,000 years ago, pushing back the earliest evidence for horse domestication—and horse riding—by about 2,000 years. Their studies also provided evidence to link several technological developments—including the use of wheeled vehicles such as chariots—to the Yamnaya people. These finds supported the idea that the steppe pastoralists had the necessary transportation and technology to fan out rapidly from their homeland and spread their language in all directions.

Revolutionary Farmers

The steppe hypothesis, also known as the kurgan hypothesis, after the kurgans, or burial mounds, in which the pastoralists buried their chiefs, was rarely questioned until the 1980s. Then Renfrew put forth a radically different idea, called the Anatolian hypothesis. ( Anatolia , from the Greek for “sunrise,” refers to present-day Turkey.) Renfrew, the dean of British prehistorians, who now sits in the House of Lords, had spent years digging in Greece and was struck by how much the artifacts he unearthed, especially the carved female figurines, resembled those from earlier archaeological sites in Turkey and the Middle East.

Archaeologists already knew that farming spread from the Middle East to Greece first. Renfrew wondered if there might be a continuity of language in addition to culture. Thus, the first PIE speakers, he posited in lectures and a book, might be the farmers who moved from Anatolia to Europe 8,500 years ago, bringing their words along with their agricultural practices.

Traditional linguists, who had spent decades working painstakingly with paper and pencil to reconstruct PIE by tracing modern Indo-European words back to their original roots, were outraged. Most dismissed the Anatolian hypothesis, sometimes with bitter invective. One University of Oxford professor called the idea “rubbish,” and another skeptic declared that “a naive reader would be grossly misled by the simplistic solutions that the author offers.”

Renfrew and his supporters fought back, arguing that the steppe hypothesis cannot explain the broad expansion of PIE from wherever it began across both Europe and Asia. Researchers know that PIE-derived languages were spoken as far west as Ireland and as far east as the Tarim Basin, in what is now northwestern China, and down into India. A key question is how PIE would have gotten from the steppes to East Asia if the kurgan hypothesis were right. Did it spread to the north around the Black and Caspian seas, as in the steppe hypothesis? Renfrew sees no archaeological evidence for this route. Or did PIE take a southerly and earlier path to the east from Anatolia? He thinks it more likely that PIE spread south around the Black Sea from Turkey and then along early trade routes through Iran and Afghanistan.

Thus, Renfrew believes, only an Anatolian origin can account for PIE's simultaneous spread to the east and west because the peninsula offers the best historical evidence of movement between the European and Asian continents. And the only sociotechnological driver powerful enough to propel the language so far in opposite directions, he adds, was the advent of agriculture, which appeared in the Fertile Crescent—just south and east of modern Turkey—roughly 11,000 years ago. This transition of human society from hunter-gatherers into settled farming communities marked the so-called Neolithic Revolution and was “the only big thing that happened on a Europe-wide basis,” Renfrew says. “If you wanted a simple theory for the coming of the Indo-European languages, the Neolithic was the best thing to hang it on.”

Emblematic of the linguists' objections to Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis is the origins of the word “wheel.” The reconstructed PIE root is * k w ék w lo -, which became cakrá - in Sanskrit, kúklos in Greek and kukäl in Tocharian A, an extinct Indo-European language of the Tarim Basin. The earliest evidence for wheeled vehicles—depictions on tablets from ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq)—dates to about 5,500 years ago. The actual remains of wagons and carts show up in kurgans beginning about 5,000 years ago.

Many linguists have argued that the PIE root for “wheel” could not have arisen until the object was invented, and so PIE cannot be much earlier than 5,500 years—or about 5,000 years after the invention of agriculture. “That doesn't mean the PIE speakers invented wheels,” Anthony says, “but it does mean that they adopted their own words for the various parts of wheeled vehicles.”

But Renfrew and others counter that the word * k w ék w lo - derives from a much earlier root meaning “to turn” or “to roll” and only later was adapted as a name for the wheel. “There was a whole language about rotation before the wheel was invented,” Renfrew says.

Andrew Garrett, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and proponent of the steppe hypothesis, agrees that the PIE word for “wheel” has an earlier derivation, the root *k

w el(h)-, which probably meant “turn” or “roll.” He says that the word * k w ék w lo - was formed by duplicating that root, putting the *k w e- part into the word twice. “It would be as if I saw a wheel for the first time,” adds Garrett's graduate student, Will Chang, “and I called it a ro-roller.” That might seem a point for Renfrew's position, but Garrett argues that while such duplications were common in PIE when forming verbs, they were “extremely rare” when forming nouns, which suggests to him and other linguists that * k w ék w lo - must have developed as a word close to the time wheels were invented.

Contested Evidence

Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis was facing an uphill battle when, in 2003, a bombshell landed in the middle of the debate from an entirely unexpected direction—the field of evolutionary biology. Russell D. Gray, a biologist who had made his early reputation studying bird cognition, and Quentin D. Atkinson, then his graduate student at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, used state-of-the-art methods from computational biology to date the origins of PIE. Gray and Atkinson adapted an earlier linguistic technique called glottochronology, which compared the proportion of cognates—words with shared roots—in different languages to determine how long ago they diverged. Glottochronology had long been out of favor because it required linguists to assume that words change their form steadily over time—something they knew was not true. Gray and Atkinson employed a new and improved version of glottochronology, along with other statistical techniques used to determine the evolutionary trees of living organisms. Their database included cognates from 87 Indo-European languages, including Hittite, an extinct language that had been spoken in Anatolia.

The results were a slam-dunk for the Anatolian hypothesis. No matter how the pair crunched the numbers, the divergence of Indo-European languages from PIE came out no later than about 8,000 years ago—or nearly 3,000 years before the apparent invention of the wheel. Despite howls of objection from some linguists that words do not change the way that living organisms and genes do, the paper was highly influential and gave a big boost to the Anatolian hypothesis. Gray, who is now co-director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (where Heggarty works), says that he and Atkinson were simply bringing linguistics into the 21st century.

Moreover, although Gray and Atkinson found that the initial spread of PIE tracked the spread of farming, they also detected a second divergence 6,500 years ago, which led to the Romance, Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages. The Anatolian and steppe hypotheses “need not be mutually exclusive,” they concluded.

Indeed, subsequent analyses favored the Anatolian hypothesis so strongly that some younger linguists began to call for older linguists to drop their objections. “Traditional linguistic objections to the Anatolian hypothesis are now wearing a little thin,” Heggarty wrote in a June 2014 commentary in Antiquity .

Calls for advocates of the steppe hypothesis to surrender, however, may have been premature. Beginning in 2013, Garrett and Chang launched their own analysis, using Gray's methodology. But the Berkeley researchers made an assumption that Gray's team did not: They “constrained” certain languages to be ancestral to their descendants, based on what they insist is solid historical evidence. Thus, they assumed, for example, that Classical Latin was directly ancestral to Romance languages such as Spanish, French and Italian. Gray and Atkinson, in contrast, allowed for the possibility that some as yet unidentified form of popular Latin spoken in the streets of Roman cities was the true ancestor of the Romance languages.

Garrett and Chang's results, published last year in Language , were also a slam-dunk—but for the steppe hypothesis, not the Anatolian hypothesis. Despite this apparent new life for the steppe hypothesis, Heggarty argues that Garrett's team is wrong to assume that some ancient languages are directly ancestral to others. Even small differences in Classical versus “Vulgar” Latin could throw off Garrett's estimates, Heggarty argues.

Garrett remains unconvinced. “For many of these languages we know quite a bit about the speech communities and the history of the languages,” he says. “Best understood are Greek and Latin. It isn't likely that there are other varieties of Greek and Latin floating around that we don't know about.”

Gray, for his part, calls the Language paper that used his own methods against the Anatolian hypothesis “a lovely piece of work” that really engages with the methods “rather than just saying [that Atkinson and I] are wrong.” Yet since turnabout is fair play, Gray's team has now started recrunching Garrett's data, but letting the data decide whether some languages are ancestral to others rather than assuming it. Although this work is preliminary and still unpublished, Gray and his colleagues are finding that the numbers again come up trumps for the Anatolian hypothesis.

New Clues from DNA

If the words themselves cannot tell us who is right, perhaps more evidence from outside the field of linguistics could help tip the balance. The latest genetic studies, at least, seem to favor the steppe hypothesis. Anthony and an international team of ancient DNA experts sequenced samples of genetic material from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago, including nine skeletons from Yamnaya sites in today's Russia, and compared the DNA samples with those from four skeletons of the later Corded Ware culture of Central Europe.

Amazingly, the Corded Ware people, whose culture spread across Europe as far as Scandinavia, could trace three quarters of their ancestry to the Yamnaya people, and this Yamnaya genetic signature is still found in most Europeans today. So the Yamnaya, along with their genes and possibly their language, did indeed sweep out of the steppes in massive numbers, probably about 4,500 years ago. These results are a “smoking gun” that such massive migrations did take place out of the steppelands, says Pontus Skoglund, an ancient DNA expert at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the paper but works in the laboratory of one of its authors. They “level the playing field” between the two hypotheses, he adds.

Unless, of course, this migration was a “secondary” wave that carried later Indo-European languages with it but not the original mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European. Such an interpretation, the pro-Anatolian researchers counter, would fit with the conclusions of Gray's 2003 study that pointed to the possibility of a later migration out of the steppes.

Will we ever know who is right? New evidence from ancient DNA for the spread of steppe peoples eastward into Siberia around 4,700 years ago could potentially overcome one of Renfrew's key objections to the steppe hypothesis, but it offers no proof about which languages went with them. One thing is sure: researchers will continue to debate the issue in whatever language their ancestors bequeathed them.

Michael Balter is a freelance journalist, whose articles have appeared in Audubon , National Geographic and Science , among other publications.

Scientific American Magazine Vol 314 Issue 5

A view of the Anatolian steppe in Turkey.

Indo-European languages: new study reconciles two dominant hypotheses about their origin

Profesor Titular (lingüística, traducción), Universitat Jaume I

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Kim Schulte has worked on "IE-CoR: A Database on Cognate Relationships in ‘core’ Indo-European vocabulary ", funded by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

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The languages in the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world’s population. This group includes a huge number of languages, ranging from English and Spanish to Russian, Kurdish and Persian.

Ever since the discovery, over two centuries ago, that these languages belong to the same family, philologists have worked to reconstruct the first Indo-European language (known as Proto-Indo-European) and establish a “language family tree”, where branches represent the evolution and separation of languages over time. This approach draws on phylogenetics – the study of how biological species evolve – which also provides the most appropriate model for describing and quantifying the historical relationships between languages.

Despite numerous studies, many questions still remain as to the origin of Indo-European: where was the original Indo-European language spoken in prehistoric times? How long ago did this language group emerge? How did it spread across Eurasia?

Anatolia or the Pontic Steppe?

There are two main, though apparently contradictory, established hypotheses. On one side we have the Anatolian Hypothesis , which traces the origins of the Indo-European people to Anatolia, in modern day Turkey, during the Neolithic era. According to this hypothesis, created by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew , Indo-European languages began to spread towards Europe around 9,000 years ago, alongside the expansion of agriculture.

On the other side we have the Steppe Hypothesis , which places the origin of Indo-European languages further north, in the Pontic Steppe . This theory states that Proto-Indo-European language emerged somewhere north of the Black Sea around 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. It is linked to Kurgan culture , known for its distinctive burial mounds and horse breeding practices.

DNA comparison

In order to decide which of these two hypotheses is correct, genetic studies have been carried out to compare DNA found at prehistoric sites with that of modern humans. However, this type of research can only provide indirect clues as to the origins of Indo-European languages, since language, unlike, for example, blood type, is not inherited through genes.

A new study published in Science has approached the question from a different angle by using direct linguistic data to assess the timelines put forward by both hypotheses.

In this project, carried out by over 80 linguists under the direction of Paul Heggarty and Cormac Anderson from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, we applied a new methodology that allowed us to obtain more exact results.

More comprehensive sampling

The samples used in earlier phylogenetic studies were taken from a limited pool of languages. Moreover, some analyses had assumed that modern languages are derived directly from ancient written languages, when they actually come from oral variants that were spoken during the same period – Spanish, for example, did not come from the classical Latin found in Virgil’s works, but from the popular or “vulgar” Latin which was spoken by ordinary people. These shortcomings and assumptions have distorted age estimates for Indo-European language family subgroups such as Germanic, Slavic or Romance.

The new study addresses these issues, eliminating inconsistencies and taking data from a wider range of sources (from 161 languages, to be exact), to provide a more balanced and complete sample set. This data then underwent a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis , a statistical method for establishing the most probable relationships between languages and branches of the family tree.

The study showed, for example, that an Italo-Celtic language family cannot exist, since the Italic and Celtic languages separated several centuries before the separation of the Germanic and Celtic languages, which took place around 5,000 years ago.

An eight thousand year old language family

Regarding the question of the origin of Indo-European languages, calculations based on the new data show that they were first spoken approximately 8,000 years ago.

The results of this research do not line up neatly with either the Anatolian or the Kurgan hypotheses. Instead they suggest that the birthplace of Indo-European languages is somewhere in the south of the Caucasus region. From there, they then expanded in various directions: westward towards Greece and Albania; eastward towards India, and northward towards the Pontic Steppe.

Around three millennia later there was then a second wave of expansion from the Pontic Steppe towards Europe, which gave rise to the majority of the languages that are spoken today in Europe. This hybrid hypothesis, which marries up the two previously established theories, also aligns with the results of the most recent studies in the field of genetic anthropology.

In addition to bringing us closer to solving the centuries-old enigma of the origin of our languages, this research illustrates how disciplines as disparate as genetics and linguistics can complement each other to provide more reliable answers to questions of human prehistory. It is hoped that the same methodology will also serve, in future research, to expand our understanding of how languages and populations spread to other continents.

This article was originally published in Spanish

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Published: 27 November 2003

Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin

Russell D. Gray 1 &
Quentin D. Atkinson 1

Nature volume 426 , pages 435–439 ( 2003 ) Cite this article

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Languages, like genes, provide vital clues about human history 1 , 2 . The origin of the Indo-European language family is “the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics” 3 . Numerous genetic studies of Indo-European origins have also produced inconclusive results 4 , 5 , 6 . Here we analyse linguistic data using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology. We test two theories of Indo-European origin: the ‘Kurgan expansion’ and the ‘Anatolian farming’ hypotheses. The Kurgan theory centres on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion into Europe and the Near East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the sixth millennium BP 7 , 8 . In contrast, the Anatolian theory claims that Indo-European languages expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around 8,000–9,500 years bp 9 . In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between 7,800 and 9,800 years bp . These results were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees and priors in the bayesian analysis.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Allan, L. Campbell, L. Chikhi, M. Corballis, N. Gavey, S. Greenhill, J. Hamm, J. Huelsenbeck, G. Nichols, A. Rodrigo, F. Ronquist, M. Sanderson and S. Shennan for useful advice and/or comments on the manuscript.

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Gray, R., Atkinson, Q. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature 426 , 435–439 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02029

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New evidence supports Anatolia hypothesis for origins of English

Submitted by Administrator on Thu, 30/08/2012 - 11:34

A recent study published in Science , and reported by news agencies including the BBC, backs a hypothesis about the origins of the Indo-European languages (including English) first proposed by the distinguished Cambridge archaeologist Professor Colin Renfrew (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) in 1987.

Professor Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis suggested that modern Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia in Neolithic times, and linked their arrival in Europe with the spread of farming. The alternative, and for many years, the more accepted view was that Indo-European languages originated around 3,000 years later in the Steppes of Russia (the Kurgan hypothesis ).

Researchers in New Zealand led by Dr. Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland have now applied research techniques used to trace virus epidemics to the study of language evolution. Using very different methods to those used by Professor Renfrew in the 1980s, they tested both the Anatolian and the Kurgan hypotheses, and their findings support the former.

Professor Renfrew comments:

"The hypothesis, which I put forward 25 years ago in my book Archaeology and Language , that the original home of the first Indo-European language was in Anatolia, was based on archaeological evidence that early farming (and the increase in population density that came with it) came to Europe from Anatolia. The argument was that the widespread adoption of a new language required a major economic and demographic change, such as the adoption of farming. Supporting evidence has come through since then that the wide regional distribution of several other language families (including Austronesian and Bantu) came about as the result of early farming dispersals.

The new and impressive finding by Quentin Atkinson and his colleagues is based on the phylogeographic analysis of purely linguistic data, and thus comes to much the same conclusion independently, using very different evidence. This gives striking support to the Anatolian hypothesis.

The traditional view that the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans was in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea derives from the old misconception that the early population of that area were mounted warrior nomad pastoralists, who allegedly invaded Europe around the beginning of the Bronze Age. Few archaeologist now believe that. But this old myth dies hard. In reality, the development of mounted cavalry did not much pre-date the Scythians of the first millennium BC.

Much emphasis is traditionally placed by some Indo-Europeanists on just a few vocabulary terms, such as those for ‘horse’, ‘wheel’, chariot’, ‘cart’ etc. on the very reasonable grounds that these features make their appearance relatively late in the archaeological record. Since there are words for these things in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, that language cannot (they argue) have dispersed before the invention, for instance, of the wheel. But these linguists sometimes use this method of linguistic palaeontology in a rather cumbersome way. They sometimes fail to acknowledge that with the invention of a new concept (e.g. the wheel), the new noun that was invented for it in the by-then different early Indo-European languages was often derived from existing concepts (e.g. ‘to rotate’ for the Latin rota , and similarly for the reconstructed Indo-European * kweklos , related to the Greek kyklos , ‘circle’). Circles and rotation have been known to humans for tens of thousands of years and cannot be used to date Proto-Indo-European!"

Follow the links for more on this item.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957.abstract?sid=192102e8-a5bc-4744-ac5a-5500338ab381

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19368988

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Anatolian hypothesis

The Anatolian hypothesis , also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory , first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia . It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis , or steppe theory, which enjoys more academic favor.

Quotes [ edit ]

Heaven, Heroes and Happiness: The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology by Shan M.M. Winn, University Press of America, Lanham-New York-London, 1995. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins .

External links [ edit ]

History of Asia

Predecessors

Arguments for the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as steppe nomads from the Pontic–Caspian region had already been made in the 19th century by the German scholars, Theodor Benfey (1869) and (1870), followed notably by Otto Schrader (1883, 1890). [7] Theodor Poesche had proposed the nearby Pinsk Marshes . In his standard work [8] about PIE and to a greater extent in a later abbreviated version, [9] Karl Brugmann took the view that the urheimat could not be identified exactly by the scholarship of his time, but he tended toward Schrader's view. However, after Karl Penka 's 1883 [10] rejection of non-European PIE origins, most scholars favoured a Northern European origin .

The view of a Pontic origin was still strongly supported, including by the archaeologists V. Gordon Childe [11] and Ernst Wahle . [12] One of Wahle's students was Jonas Puzinas , who became one of Marija Gimbutas's teachers. Gimbutas, who acknowledged Schrader as a precursor, [13] painstakingly marshalled a wealth of archaeological evidence from the territory of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc that was not readily available to Western scholars, revealing a fuller picture of prehistoric Europe.

When it was first proposed in 1956, in The Prehistory of Eastern Europe, Part 1 , Gimbutas's contribution to the search for Indo-European origins was an interdisciplinary synthesis of archaeology and linguistics. The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins identifies the Pontic–Caspian steppe as the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) urheimat , and a variety of late PIE dialects are assumed to have been spoken across this region. According to this model, the Kurgan culture gradually expanded to the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe, Kurgan IV being identified with the Yamnaya culture of around 3000 BC.

The mobility of the Kurgan culture facilitated its expansion over the entire region and is attributed to the domestication of the horse followed by the use of early chariots . The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Sredny Stog culture north of the Azov Sea in Ukraine , and would correspond to an early PIE or pre-PIE nucleus of the 5th millennium BC. Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes led to hybrid, or in Gimbutas's terms "kurganized" cultures, such as the Globular Amphora culture to the west. From these kurganized cultures came the immigration of Proto-Greeks to the Balkans and the nomadic Indo-Iranian cultures to the east around 2500 BC.

Kurgan culture

Cultural horizon.

Gimbutas defined and introduced the term " Kurgan culture " in 1956 with the intention of introducing a "broader term" that would combine Sredny Stog II , Pit Grave (Yamnaya), and Corded ware horizons (spanning the 4th to 3rd millennia in much of Eastern and Northern Europe). The Kurgan archaeological culture or cultural horizon comprises the various cultures of the Pontic–Caspian steppe in the Copper Age to Early Bronze Age (5th to 3rd millennia BC), identified by similar artifacts and structures, but subject to inevitable imprecision and uncertainty. The eponymous kurgan s (mound graves) are only one among several common features.

Cultures that Gimbutas considered as part of the "Kurgan culture":

Bug–Dniester (6th millennium)
Samara (5th millennium)
Khvalynsk (5th millennium)
Dnieper–Donets (5th to 4th millennia)
Sredny Stog (mid-5th to mid-4th millennia)
Maikop – Deriivka (mid-4th to mid-3rd millennia)
Yamnaya (Pit Grave)

This is itself a varied cultural horizon, spanning the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe from the mid-4th to the 3rd millennium.

Usatovo culture (late 4th millennium)

Stages of culture and expansion

Gimbutas's original suggestion identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture:

Kurgan I , Dnieper / Volga region, earlier half of the 4th millennium BC. Apparently evolving from cultures of the Volga basin, subgroups include the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures.
Kurgan II–III , latter half of the 4th millennium BC. Stone circle s, anthropomorphic stone stelae of deities. Includes the Sredny Stog culture and the Maykop culture of the northern Caucasus .
Kurgan IV or Pit Grave (Yamnaya) culture, first half of the 3rd millennium BC, encompassing the entire steppe region from the Ural to Romania .

In other publications she proposes three successive "waves" of expansion:

Wave 1 , predating Kurgan I, expansion from the lower Volga to the Dnieper, leading to coexistence of Kurgan I and the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture . Repercussions of the migrations extend as far as the Balkans and along the Danube to the Vinča culture in Serbia and Lengyel culture in Hungary .
Wave 2 , mid 4th 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 ). According to Gimbutas this corresponds to the first intrusion of Indo-European languages into western and northern Europe.
Wave 3 , 3000–2800 BC, expansion of the Pit Grave culture beyond the steppes, with the appearance of the characteristic pit graves as far as modern Romania, Bulgaria, eastern Hungary and Georgia, coincident with the end of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture and Trialeti culture in Georgia .
4500–4000: Early PIE . Sredny Stog, Dnieper–Donets and Samara cultures, domestication of the horse ( Wave 1 ).
4000–3500: The Pit Grave culture (a.k.a. Yamnaya culture), the prototypical kurgan builders, emerges in the steppe, and the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus . Indo-Hittite models postulate the separation of Proto-Anatolian before this time.
3500–3000: Middle PIE . The Pit Grave culture is at its peak, representing the classical reconstructed Proto-Indo-European society with stone idols , predominantly practicing animal husbandry in permanent settlements protected by hillfort s, subsisting on agriculture, and fishing along rivers. Contact of the Pit Grave culture with late Neolithic Europe cultures results in the "kurganized" Globular Amphora and Baden cultures ( Wave 2 ). The Maykop culture shows the earliest evidence of the beginning Bronze Age , and Bronze weapons and artifacts are introduced to Pit Grave territory. Probable early Satemization .
3000–2500: Late PIE . The Pit Grave culture extends over the entire Pontic steppe ( Wave 3 ). The Corded Ware culture extends from the Rhine to the Volga , corresponding to the latest phase of Indo-European unity, the vast "kurganized" area disintegrating into various independent languages and cultures, still in loose contact enabling the spread of technology and early loans between the groups, except for the Anatolian and Tocharian branches, which are already isolated from these processes. The centum–satem break is probably complete, but the phonetic trends of Satemization remain active.

Further expansion during the Bronze Age

See main article: Indo-European migrations . The Kurgan hypothesis describes the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European during the 5th and 4th millennia BC. [14] As used by Gimbutas, the term "kurganized" implied that the culture could have been spread by no more than small bands who imposed themselves on local people as an elite. This idea of PIE and its daughter languages diffusing east and west without mass movement proved popular with archaeologists in the 1970s (the pots-not-people paradigm). [15] The question of further Indo-Europeanization of Central and Western Europe, Central Asia and Northern India during the Bronze Age is beyond the scope of the Kurgan hypothesis, and far more uncertain than the events of the Copper Age, and subject to some controversy. The rapidly developing fields of archaeogenetics and genetic genealogy since the late 1990s have not only confirmed a migratory pattern out of the Pontic Steppe at the relevant time [3] [4] [16] but also suggest the possibility that the population movement involved was more substantial than earlier anticipated and invasive. [16] [17]

Invasion versus diffusion scenarios (1980s onward)

Gimbutas believed that the expansions of the Kurgan culture were a series of essentially-hostile military incursions in which a new warrior culture imposed itself on the peaceful, matrilinear , and matrifocal (but not matriarchal ) cultures of " Old Europe " and replaced it with a patriarchal warrior society, a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains:

In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the authoritarian nature of this transition from the egalitarian society centered on the nature/earth mother goddess ( Gaia ) to a patriarchy worshipping the father/sun/weather god (Zeus, Dyaus ). [18]

J. P. Mallory (in 1989) accepted the Kurgan hypothesis as the de facto standard theory of Indo-European origins, but he distinguished it from an implied "radical" scenario of military invasion. Gimbutas's actual main scenario involved slow accumulation of influence through coercion or extortion, as distinguished from general raiding shortly followed by conquest:

Alignment with Anatolian hypothesis (2000s)

See main article: Anatolian hypothesis .

In the 2000s, Alberto Piazza and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza tried to align the Anatolian hypothesis with the steppe theory. According to 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 Anatolia ." According to Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (2006), the Yamna-culture may have been derived from Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers who migrated to the Pontic steppe and developed pastoral nomadism. Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is " some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East." Nevertheless, the Anatolian hypothesis is incompatible with the linguistic evidence.

Anthony's revised steppe theory (2007)

David Anthony 's The Horse, the Wheel and Language describes his "revised steppe theory". He considers the term "Kurgan culture" so imprecise as to be useless, and instead uses the core Yamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as points of reference. [19] He points out:

He does not include the Maykop culture among those that he considers to be Indo-European-speaking and presumes instead that they spoke a Caucasian language .

Hamangia culture
Varna culture
Animal sacrifice
Revised Kurgan theory
Germanic substrate hypothesis
Archaeogenetics of Europe
Haplogroup R1a
Lactase persistence

Competing hypotheses

Armenian hypothesis
Anatolian hypothesis
Out of India theory
Paleolithic continuity theory

Bibliography

. Anthony . David W. . Bogucki . Peter . Comşa . Eugen . Gimbutas . Marija . Jovanović . Borislav . Mallory . J. P. . Milisaukas . Sarunas . The "Kurgan Culture," Indo-European Origins, and the Domestication of the Horse: A Reconsideration . Current Anthropology . 1986 . 27 . 4 . 291–313 . 10.1086/203441 . 2743045 . 143388176 . 0011-3204.
Book: Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca . Genes, peoples, and languages . Farrar Straus & Giroux . 2000 . 978-0-86547-529-8 .
Book: Piazza . Alberto . Cavalli-Sforza . Luigi . Diffusion of genes and languages in human evolution . Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Evolution of Language . 2006 . 255–266 . http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/piazza06evolang.html.
Book: Strazny. Philipp. 2000. Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Routledge. 1st. 978-1-57958-218-0.

External links

Humanjourney.us, The Indo-Europeans

Notes and References

Book: Renfrew, Colin. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. 1990. CUP Archive. 978-0-521-38675-3. 37–38.
Jones-Bley. Karlene. 2008. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, November 3–4, 2006. Historiographia Linguistica. en. 35. 3. 465–467. 10.1075/hl.35.3.15koe. 0302-5160.
Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia . Allentoft . etal . 2015 . Nature . 522 . 7555 . 167–172 . 10.1038/nature14507. 26062507 . 2015Natur.522..167A . 4399103 .
Mathieson . Iain . Lazaridis . Iosif . Rohland . Nadin . Mallick . Swapan . Patterson . Nick . Roodenberg . Songül Alpaslan . Harney . Eadaoin . Stewardson . Kristin . Fernandes . Daniel . Novak . Mario . Sirak . Kendra . 2015. Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians . Nature . en . 528 . 7583 . 499–503 . 10.1038/nature16152 . 1476-4687 . 4918750 . 26595274. 2015Natur.528..499M .
Narasimhan . Vagheesh M. . Patterson . Nick . Moorjani . Priya . Rohland . Nadin . Bernardos . Rebecca . Mallick . Swapan . Lazaridis . Iosif . Nakatsuka . Nathan . Olalde . Iñigo . Lipson . Mark . Kim . Alexander M. . 2019. The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia . Science . en . 365 . 6457 . eaat7487 . 10.1126/science.aat7487 . 0036-8075 . 6822619 . 31488661.
Shinde . Vasant . Narasimhan . Vagheesh M. . Rohland . Nadin . Mallick . Swapan . Mah . Matthew . Lipson . Mark . Nakatsuka . Nathan . Adamski . Nicole . Broomandkhoshbacht . Nasreen . Ferry . Matthew . Lawson . Ann Marie . 2019-10-17 . An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers . Cell . English . 179 . 3 . 729–735.e10 . 10.1016/j.cell.2019.08.048 . 0092-8674 . 6800651 . 31495572.
Book: Grünthal. Riho. A Linguistic Map of Prehistoric Northern Europe. Kallio. Petri. 2012 . Société Finno-Ougrienne. 978-952-5667-42-4. 122.
Karl Brugmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen , vol. 1.1, Strassburg 1886, p. 2.
Karl Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen , vol. 1, Strassburg 1902, pp. 22–23.
Karl Penka, Origines Ariacae: Linguistisch-ethnologische Untersuchungen zur ältesten Geschichte der arischen Völker und Sprachen (Vienna: Taschen, 1883), 68.
Vere Gordon Childe, The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (London: Kegan Paul, 1926).
Ernst Wahle (1932). Deutsche Vorzeit , Leipzig 1932.
Book: Gimbutas. Marija. The Balts . 1963. Thames & Hudson. London. 38 . https://web.archive.org/web/20131030062207/http://www.vaidilute.com/books/gimbutas/gimbutas-02.html . 2013-10-30.
The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th edition, 22:587–588
Web site: . Facing the ocean . Discover Magazine Blog – Gene Expression . 28 April 2012 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20130609041146/http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/04/facing-the-ocean/ . 2013-06-09.
Reich . David . The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years . Science . 15 March 2019. 363 . 6432 . 1230–1234 . 10.1126/science.aav4040 . 30872528 . 6436108 . 2019Sci...363.1230O . free .
Preston . Douglas . The Skeletons at the Lake . 13 February 2021 . Annals of Science . The New Yorker . December 7, 2020.
Gimbutas . Marija . 1993-08-01 . The Indo-Europeanization of Europe: the intrusion of steppe pastoralists from south Russia and the transformation of Old Europe . WORD . 44 . 2 . 205–222 . 10.1080/00437956.1993.11435900 . 0043-7956. free . Free PDF download .
, "Why not a Kurgan Culture?"

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License . It uses material from the Wikipedia article " Kurgan hypothesis ".

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Kurgan_hypothesis

The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins draws on both archaeology and linguistics to identify specific archaeological cultures with different stages of the Indo-European expansion.

The Kurgan's thesis is the predominant model of Indo-European origins. [1] [2]

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The Kurgan hypothesis originated as a mutual compromise between linguistics and archaeology. The archaeological interpretation of evidence as presented first by Marija Gimbutas, is still considered by historical linguists to give an acceptable approximation to the date at which any set of related Indo-European languages must have started to diverge.

When it was first proposed in 1956, Marija Gimbutas's answer to the question of Indo-European origins was a pioneering interdisciplinary synthesis of archaeology and linguistics. From the 1990s on, new archaeological evidence from Northern European prehistoric cultures was put forward to contest the influence and expansion of Kurgan cultures to the west, and the process of "kurganization" of especially Corded Ware cultures lost its former credibility. [3] The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins identifies the Pontic-Caspian steppe as the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) Urheimat, and a variety of late PIE dialects is assumed to have been spoken across the region. According to this model, the Kurgan culture gradually expanded until it encompassed the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe, Kurgan IV being identified with the Pit Grave culture of around 3000 BC.

The mobility of the Kurgan culture facilitated its expansion over the entire Pit Grave region, and is attributed to the domestication of the horse and later the use of early chariots. [4] The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Sredny Stog culture north of the Azov Sea in Ukraine, and would correspond to an early PIE or pre-PIE nucleus of the 5th millennium BC. [4] The earliest known chariot was discovered at Krivoye Lake and dates to c. 2000 BC. [5]

Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes leads to hybrid cultures, such as the Globular Amphora culture to the west, the immigration of proto-Greeks to the Balkans and the nomadic Indo-Iranian cultures to the east around 2500 BC.

Stages of expansion

Gimbutas' original suggestion identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture and three successive "waves" of expansion.

Kurgan I , Dnieper/Volga region, earlier half of the 4th millennium BC. Apparently evolving from cultures of the Volga basin, subgroups include the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures.
Kurgan II–III , latter half of the 4th 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 3rd millennium BC, encompassing the entire steppe region from the Ural to Romania.
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 Vinca and Lengyel cultures in Hungary.
Wave 2 , mid 4th 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). In the belief of Gimbutas, this corresponds to the first intrusion of Indo-European languages into western and northern Europe.
Wave 3 , 3000–2800 BC, expansion of the Pit Grave culture beyond the steppes, with the appearance of the characteristic pit graves as far as the areas of modern Romania, Bulgaria and eastern Hungary.

Secondary Urheimat

The "kurganized" Globular Amphora culture in Europe is proposed as a "secondary Urheimat", separating into the Bell-beaker culture and Corded Ware culture around 2300 BC and ultimately resulting in the European branches of Italic, Celtic and Germanic languages, and other, partly extinct, language groups of the Balkans and central Europe, possibly including the proto-Mycenaean invasion of Greece.

4500–4000: Early PIE . Sredny Stog, Dnieper-Donets and Samara cultures, domestication of the horse ( Wave 1 ).
4000–3500: The Pit Grave culture (a.k.a. yamna culture), the prototypical kurgan builders, emerges in the steppe, and the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus. Indo-Hittite models postulate the separation of Proto-Anatolian before this time.
3500–3000: Middle PIE . The Pit Grave culture is at its peak, representing the classical reconstructed Proto-Indo-European society, with stone idols, early two-wheeled proto-chariots, predominantly practicing animal husbandry , but also with permanent settlements and hillforts, subsisting on agriculture and fishing, along rivers. Contact of the Pit Grave culture with late Neolithic Europe cultures results in the "kurganized" Globular Amphora Baden cultures ( Wave 2 ). The Maykop culture shows the earliest evidence of the beginning Bronze Age, and Bronze weapons and artifacts are introduced to Pit Grave territory. Probable early Satemization.
3000–2500: Late PIE . The Pit Grave culture extends over the entire Pontic steppe ( Wave 3 ). The Corded Ware culture extends from the Rhine to the Volga, corresponding to the latest phase of Indo-European unity, the vast "kurganized" area disintegrating into various independent languages and cultures, still in loose contact enabling the spread of technology and early loans between the groups, except for the Anatolian and Tocharian branches, which are already isolated from these processes. The Centum-Satem break is probably complete, but the phonetic trends of Satemization remain active.
2500–2000: The breakup into the proto-languages of the attested dialects is complete. Proto-Greek is spoken in the Balkans, Proto-Indo-Iranian north of the Caspian in the emerging Andronovo culture. The Bronze Age reaches Central Europe with the Beaker culture, likely composed of various Centum dialects. The Tarim mummies possibly correspond to proto-Tocharians.
2000–1500: Catacomb culture north of the black sea. The chariot is invented, leading to the split and rapid spread of Iranian and Indo-Aryan from the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex over much of Central Asia, Northern India, Iran and Eastern Anatolia. Proto-Anatolian is split into Hittite and Luwian. The pre-Proto-Celtic Unetice culture has an active metal industry (Nebra skydisk).
1500–1000: The Nordic Bronze Age develops pre-Proto-Germanic, and the (pre)-Proto-Celtic Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures emerge in Central Europe, introducing the Iron Age. Migration of the Proto-Italians into the Italian peninsula (Bagnolo stele). Redaction of the Rigveda and rise of the Vedic civilization in the Punjab. The Mycenaean civilization gives way to the Greek Dark Ages.
1000 BC–500 BC: The Celtic languages spread over Central and Western Europe. Proto Germanic. Homer and the beginning of Classical Antiquity. The Vedic Civilization gives way to the Mahajanapadas. Zoroaster composes the Gathas, rise of the Achaemenid Empire, replacing the Elamites and Babylonia. Separation of Proto-Italic into Osco-Umbrian and Latin-Faliscan. Genesis of the Greek and Old Italic alphabets. A variety of Paleo-Balkan languages are spoken in Southern Europe. The Anatolian languages are extinct.

A specific haplogroup R1a1 defined by the M17 ( SNP marker) of the Y chromosome (see:[5] for nomenclature) is associated by some with the Kurgan culture. The haplogroup R1a1 is currently found in Slavic populations and in central and western Asia, India, but it is rare in most countries of Western Europe ( e.g. France, or some parts of Great Britain) (see [6] [7]). However, 23.6% of Norwegians, 18.4% of Swedes, 16.5% of Danes, 11% of Saami share this lineage ([8]).

Investigations suggest the Hg R1a1 gene expanded from the Dniepr-Don Valley, between 13 000 and 7600 years ago, and was linked to the reindeer hunters of the Ahrensburg culture that started from the Dniepr valley in Ukraine and reached Scandinavia 12 000 years ago. [6]

Ornella Semino et al. (see [9]) propose this postglacial spread of the R1a1 gene from the Ukrainian LGM refuge was magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward. R1a1 is most prevalent in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and is also observed in Pakistan, India, and central Asia.

Correspondingly, R1b (also Eu18 — see [10] for nomenclature conversions) was spread from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) following the last glacial period (20,000 to 13,000 years ago), and is still prevalent in western Europe, or Atlantic Europe, especially in the Basque Country, without being rare in eastern Europe.

Another marker that closely corresponds to Kurgan migrations is distribution of blood group B allele, mapped by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza . The distribution of blood group B allele in Europe matches the proposed map of Kurgan Culture, and Haplogroup R1a1 (YDNA) distribution.

Criticisms and qualifications

Archeological evidence.

So far archaeologists can trace back the origins of the Kurgan culture to the 5th millennium, although its earlier antecedents are still unknown. [7] Archaeologists are generally more critical of the Kurgan hypothesis than Indo-Europeanists. New archaeological evidence contests the spread of Kurgan culture to the west and instead points at local developments within Corded Ware and previous Funnelbeaker cultures, pushing back the archaeological continuity of western Indo-European cultures to at least the 5th millennium BC. This has led some archaeologists to declare the Kurgan hypothesis "obsolete". [8] However, it is generally held unrealistic to believe that a proto-historic people can be assigned to any particular group on basis of archaeological material alone. [9]

Language does not equal ethnic group

Also, the field of linguistics is attempting to develop new investigative techniques for formative linguistic processes. [10] Linguists argue linguistic expansion does not imply "kurganization" of material cultures, and hold extrapolating current linguistic developments to the past to be precarious (for instance deflexion should be excluded for being a Western European non-representative linguistic process), to conclude a separation between Centum and Satem in the fourth millennium is appropriate but does not imply a different stance on the material cultures involved. [11]

Belligerent expansion or peaceful merges?

Gimbutas believed that the expansions of the Kurgan culture were a series of essentially hostile, military invasions where a new warrior culture imposed itself on the peaceful, matriarchal cultures of "Old Europe", replacing it with a patriarchal warrior society, a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains:

In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the violent nature of this transition from the Mediterranean cult of the Mother Goddess to a patriarchal society and the worship of the warlike Thunderer (Zeus, Dyaus), to a point of essentially formulating feminist archaeology. Many scholars who accept the general scenario of Indo-European migrations proposed, maintain that the transition was likely much more gradual and peaceful than suggested by Gimbutas. The migrations were certainly not a sudden, concerted military operation, but the expansion of disconnected tribes and cultures, spanning many generations. To what degree the indigenous cultures were peacefully amalgamated or violently displaced remains a matter of controversy among supporters of the Kurgan hypothesis.

JP Mallory accepts the Kurgan hypothesis as the de-facto standard theory of Indo-European origins, but he recognizes valid criticism of Gimbutas' radical scenario of military invasion: almost all the arguments for invasion and cultural transformation are far better explained without reference to Kurgan expansion.

Häusler's Problem

The Corded Ware culture has always been important in locating the Indo-European origins. The German archaeologist Alexander Häusler was an important proponent of archeologists that searched for homeland evidence here. He sharply criticised Gimbutas' concept of 'a' Kurgan culture that mixes several distinct cultures like the pit-grave culture. Häusler's criticism mostly stemmed from a distinctive lack of archeological evidence until 1950 from what was then the East Bloc, from which time on plenty of evidence for Gimbutas's Kurgan hypothesis was discovered for decades (Schmoeckel 1999). He was unable to link Corded Ware to the Indo-Europeans of the Balkans, Greece or Anatolia, and neither to the Indo-Europeans in Asia. Nevertheless, establishing the correct relationship between the Corded Ware and Pontic-Caspian regions is still considered essential to solving the entire homeland problem. [12]

Renfrew's Linguistic Timedepth

While the Kurgan scenario is widely accepted as one of the leading answers to the question of Indo-European origins, it is still a speculative model, not normative. The main alternative suggestion is the theory of Colin Renfrew and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, postulating an Anatolian Urheimat, and the spread of the Indo-European languages as a result of the spread of agriculture. This belief implies a significantly older age of the Proto-Indo-European language (ca. 9,000 years as opposed to ca. 6,000 years), and among traditional linguists finds rather less support than the Kurgan theory, on grounds of glottochronology (though this method is widely rejected as invalid by mainstream historical linguistics), since the PIE language contained words for devices especially related to cattle-breeding and riding invented not earlier than the 5th millennium BC by nomadic tribes in Asian steppes, and because there are some difficulties in correlating the geographical distribution of the Indo-European branches with the advance of agriculture.

A study in 2003 by Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson at the University of Auckland[11], using a computer analysis based upon lexical data, favours an earlier date for Proto-Indo-European than assumed by the Kurgan model, ca. the 7th millennium consistent with Renfrew's Anatolian Urheimat. Their result is based on maximum likelihood analysis of Swadesh lists. Their results run counter to many accepted categorizations of linguistic relations between the different branches within the Indo-European languages tree, and claim the Hittite language to be 9,000 years old which does not hold up with the linguistic and correspondent archeological evidence as the earliest forms of Hittite contained words for wheel , cart , and chariot , all unknown devices by that time.

Occurrence of Horse-riding in Europe

According to Gimbutas's hypothesis, the reconstructed linguistic evidence suggests that the Indo-Europeans were horse-riding warriors who used thrusting weapons and could easily overrun other areas, and did do so insofar as central Europe is concerned, around the fourth-fifth millennia BC. On the techno-cultural level, the Kurgan people were essentially at a pastoral stage. Discounting this equation, Renfrew (1999: 268) holds that on the European scene mounted warriors appear only as late as the turn of the second-first millennia BC and these could in no case have been Gimbutas's Kurgan warriors predating the facts by some 2,000 years. Mallory (1989, p136) also joins in here and enumerates linguistic evidence pointing to PIE period employment of horses in paired draught, something that would not have been possible before the invention of the spoked wheel and chariot, normally dated after about 2500 BC. This problem is yet to be resolved.

Level of civilization vs. language

On the linguistic turf, there comes a severe attack by Kathrin Krell (1998) who finds a great incongruity between the terms found in the reconstructed Indo-European language and the cultural level met with in the kurgans. For example, Krell holds that the Indo-Europeans had reached an agricultural level whereas the Kurgan people were just at a pastoral stage. There are others, like Mallory and Schmitt, who are equally critical of Gimbutas’s hypothesis. [13]

Fredrik Kortlandt's revision: No PIE language prior to Sredny Stog

Frederik Kortlandt (comparative linguistics, university Leiden) proposes a revision of the Kurgan model [14] . He states the main objection which can be raised against Gimbutas' scheme (e.g., 1985: 198) is that it starts from the archaeological evidence and looks for a linguistic interpretation. Starting from the linguistic evidence and trying to fit the pieces into a coherent whole, he arrives at the following picture: The territory of the Sredny Stog culture in the eastern Ukraine he calls the most convincing candidate for the original Indo-European homeland. The Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations to the west, east and south (as described by Mallory 1989 ) became speakers of Balto-Slavic, while the speakers of the other satem languages would have to be assigned to the Yamnaya horizon, and the western Indo-Europeans to the Corded Ware horizon. Returning to the Balts and the Slavs, their ancestors should be correlated to the Middle Dnieper culture. Then, following Mallory (pp197f) and assuming the origin of this culture to be sought in the Sredny Stog, Yamnaya and Late Tripolye cultures, he proposes the course of these events corresponds with the development of a satem language which was drawn into the western Indo-European sphere of influence.

According to Frederik Kortlandt, there seems to be a general tendency to date proto-languages farther back in time than is warranted by the linguistic evidence. However, if the Indo-Hittite and Indo-European could be correlated with the beginning and the end of the Sredny Stog culture, respectively, he states that the linguistic evidence from the overall Indo-European family does not lead us beyond Gimbutas' secondary homeland, thus that the Khvalynsk culture on the middle Volga and the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus cannot be identified with the Indo-Europeans. Any proposal which goes beyond the Sredny Stog culture must start from the possible affinities of Indo-European with other language families. Taken into account the typological similarity of Proto-Indo-European to the North-West Caucasian languages and assuming this similarity can be attributed to areal factors, Frederik Kortlandt thinks of Indo-European as a branch of Uralo-Altaic which was transformed under the influence of a Caucasian substratum. Such events would be supported by archaeological evidence and locate the earliest ancestors of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European north of the Caspian Sea in the seventh millennium (cf. Mallory 1989: 192f.), essentially in agreement with Gimbutas’ theory.

^ Mallory (1989 :185). "The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many archaeologists and linguists, in part or total. It is the solution one encounters in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse ."
^ Strazny (2000 :163). "The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan hypothesis)..."
^ The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology - Oxford University Press, 2004 [1]
^ a b Parpola in Blench & Spriggs (1999 :181). "The history of the Indo-European words for 'horse' shows that the Proto-Indo-European speakers had long lived in an area where the horse was native and/or domesticated ( Mallory 1989 :161–63). The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Ukrainian Srednij Stog culture, which flourished c. 4200–3500 BC and is likely to represent an early phase of the Proto-Indo-European culture ( Anthony 1986 :295f.; Mallory 1989 :162, 197–210). During the Pit Grave culture ( c. 3500–2800 BC) which continued the cultures related to Srednij Stog and probably represents the late phase of the Proto-Indo-European culture – full-scale pastoral technology, including the domesticated horse, wheeled vehicles, stockbreeding and limited horticulture, spread all over the Pontic steppes, and, c. 3000 BC, in practically every direction from this centre (Anthony 1986 , 1991 ; Mallory 1989 , vol. 1).
^ Anthony & Vinogradov (1995 )
^ Passarino, G; Cavalleri GL, Lin AA, Cavalli-Sforza LL, Borresen-Dale AL, Underhill PA (2002). "Different genetic components in the Norwegian population revealed by the analysis of mtDNA and Y chromosome polymorphisms". Eur. J. Hum. Genet. 10 (9): 521–9. PMID 12173029.
^ The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, 22:587-588
^ Pre- & protohistorie van de lage landen, onder redactie van J.H.F. Bloemers & T. van Dorp 1991. De Haan/Open Universiteit. ISBN 90 269 4448 9 , NUGI 644
^ The Germanic Invasions, the making of Europe 400-600 AD - Lucien Musset, ISBN 1-56619-326-5 , p7
^ The Meertens Institute (KNAW) and the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (UvA) have started a research-program called Variation in Inflection, or simply Variflex, to combine theoretical linguistics, diachronic linguistics, dialectology, first language acquisition and second language acquisition. [2].
^ Frederik Kortlandt, Professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics, University of Leiden - unpublished communication, may 2007
^ In Search of the Indo-Europeans - J.P.Mallory, Thames and Hudson 1989, p245, ISBN 0-500-27616-1
^ The Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture - Some Thoughts] by Prof. B.B.Lal ( Director General (Retd.), Archaeological Survey of India, [3]
^ Frederik Kortlandt-The spread of the Indo-Europeans, 2002,[4]
Anthony, David & Vinogradov, Nikolai (1995), " ", Archaeology 48 (2): 36–41 .
Blench, Roger & Spriggs, Matthew, eds. (1999), , vol. III: Artefacts, languages and texts , London: Routledge .
Dexter, A.R. & Jones-Bley, K., eds. (1997), , Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, ISBN 0-941694-56-9 .
Mallory, J.P. & Adams, D.Q., eds. (1997), , London: Fitzroy Dearborn, ISBN 1-884964-98-2 .
Mallory, J.P. (1989), , London: Thames & Hudson, ISBN 0-500-27616-1 .
Schmoeckel, Reinhard (1999), , Bergisch-Gladbach (Germany): Bastei Lübbe, ISBN 3404641620
Strazny, Philip (Ed). (2000), (1 ed.), Routledge, ISBN 978-1579582180
Zanotti, D. G. (1982), " ", Journal of Indo-European Studies 10 : 223-234 .
Yamna culture
Ukrainian stone stela
Domestication of the horse
Animal sacrifice, Ashvamedha
Shaft tomb, Tumulus
Ukrainian LGM refuge
Armenian hypothesis
Anatolian hypothesis
Out of India theory
Broad Homeland hypothesis
Paleolithic Continuity Theory

Category : Horse history and evolution

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A Vedic Aryan Homeland in the Steppes? A Critique of the Kurgan Hypothesis
インド＝ヨーロッパ語族の起源／クルガン仮説
Eurogenes Blog: So far so good for the Kurgan hypothesis
Pin on The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David Anthony
Pin by Susann H. on historical maps
ANATOLIAN VE KURGAN

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Kurgan hypothesis
Indo-European topics. The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory, Kurgan model, or steppe theory) is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and parts of Asia.
Anatolian hypothesis
The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia.It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis, or steppe theory, which enjoys more academic favor. [citation needed]
The Kurgan Hypothesis: The Pontic-Caspian Steppe Theory of Indo
Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-American archaeologist, first proposed the Steppe Hypothesis—also referred to as the Kurgan Hypothesis—in the 1950s. Her theory was grounded in archaeological evidence, particularly the Kurgan culture, which was prevalent in the Pontic-Caspian steppe region during the 4th to 1st millennia BCE. ... Colin Renfrew ...
Proto-Indo-European homeland
The main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis is the Anatolian hypothesis advanced by Colin Renfrew in 1987. It couples the spread of the Indo-European languages to the hard fact of the Neolithic spread of farming from the Near East, stating that the Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 ...
New Evidence Fuels Debate over the Origin of Modern Languages
Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas first proposed the Ukrainian origin, known as the kurgan hypothesis, in the 1950s. Gimbutas traced the language back to the Yamnaya people, herders from the southern ...
Colin Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis: Tracing the Roots of Proto-Indo
The Anatolian hypothesis, a theory that British archaeologist Colin Renfrew first put forth in 1987, has become a fascinating topic of discussion in the fields of historical linguistics and archaeology. This theory offers an alternative perspective on the origins of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, suggesting that it evolved in Neolithic ...
New Study Traces Linguistic Paths: How Language Dispersal Echoes
The new study appears to align more closely with Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis for the distribution of Indo-European languages. Renfrew's theory, proposed in the 1980s, posits that the spread of Indo-European languages was closely tied to the diffusion of agriculture from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) around 8,000-9,500 years ago.
PDF The rehabilitation of Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan theory, recent research
3. Colin Renfrew rehabilitating Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan-theory 4. David Anthony: 'Marija Gimbutas was right'… 5. Concluding remark 1. The Kurgan-theory of Marija Gimbutas Cultures in Old Europe: 6500 BC-4500 (left), 4000-3500 BC (middle), right 3500-3000 BC mapping the end of the Neolithic. The Kurgan-people, LOMA, 135. Marija Gimbutas ...
Search for the Indo-Europeans
The "Kurgan hypothesis," as this dramatic account of the spread of the Indo-European language family during the Early Bronze Age is known, was the dominant paradigm among linguists and archaeologists during much of the 20th century. ... most linguists and many archaeologists reacted with hostility to Renfrew's hypothesis, in part because ...
Language evolution and human history: what a difference a date makes
Renfrew maintains that the linguistic argument for the Kurgan theory is based only on limited evidence for a few enigmatic Proto-Indo-European word forms. He points out that parallel semantic shifts or wide-spread borrowing can produce similar word forms across different languages without requiring that an ancestral term was present in the ...
On the Indo-European homeland
Even a brief review of all (or most) competing theories will take us too far afield, so I will focus here on the main competitor of the Kurgan hypothesis, the Anatolian theory, advanced by Colin Renfrew, a British archaeologist and archeogeneticist. Renfrew's answers to both the "where" and "when" questions are different from Gimbutas ...
The Beginnings of Patriarchy in Europe: Reflections on the Kurgan
Gimbutas' Kurgan Hypothesis remains the most consistently debated explanation of these changes, which she described as 'a collision of culture' resulting in radical transformations of ideology and social structure. ... Makkay 1987; Renfrew 1987).5 In In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989), James Mallory writes, "the Kurgan theory has ...
Farmers vs. Nomads: Whose Lingo Spread the Farthest?
Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis was facing an uphill battle when, in 2003, a bombshell landed in the middle of the debate from an entirely unexpected direction—the field of evolutionary biology.
From Heofonum to Heavens
Kurgan theory but consistent with the Renfrew hypothesis. Forster and Toth used bilingual Gaulish-Latin inscriptions to date the first split of Celtic from the rest of the Indo-European lan-guages. (Gaulish was the ver-sion of Celtic spoken in France.) Their best guess came out at around 5200 years ago, whereas the Kurgan hypothesis
Indo-European migrations
A number of alternative theories have been proposed, most notably the Anatolian hypothesis and the Armenian hypothesis. Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis suggests a much earlier date for the Indo-European languages, proposing an origin in Anatolia and an initial spread with the earliest farmers who migrated to Europe. It has been the only serious ...
Indo-European languages: new study reconciles two dominant hypotheses
According to this hypothesis, created by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, Indo-European languages began to spread towards Europe around 9,000 years ago, alongside the expansion of agriculture ...
Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of ...
In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of ...
New evidence supports Anatolia hypothesis for origins of English
A recent study published in Science, and reported by news agencies including the BBC, backs a hypothesis about the origins of the Indo-European languages (including English) first proposed by the distinguished Cambridge archaeologist Professor Colin Renfrew (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) in 1987.. Professor Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis suggested that modern Indo-European languages originated ...
Kurgan hypothesis
Kurgan hypothesis. Map of Indo-European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BC, based on the Kurgan model. The red area corresponds to the area that may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples by 2500 BC, and the orange area had been settled by Indo-European-speakers by 1000 BC. The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins is about both ...
Anatolian hypothesis
The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis, or steppe theory, which enjoys more academic favor.
Kurgan hypothesis explained
The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory, Kurgan model, or steppe theory) is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and parts of Asia. It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black ...
AP Human Geography Chapter 5 Flashcards
The theory that the first Proto-Indo-European speakers were Kurgans, who conquered much of Europe and South Asia between 3500 and 2500 B.c, diffusing their language through war and conquest. Kurgan Nomadic herders, whose homeland was in the steppes near the border between present-day Russia and Kazakhstan.
Kurgan_hypothesis
Kurgan hypothesis This article or section may require restructuring to meet Wikipedia's .Please discuss this issue on the talk page. This article has been. ... not normative. The main alternative suggestion is the theory of Colin Renfrew and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, postulating an Anatolian Urheimat, and the spread of the Indo-European languages ...