The Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses are designed to explain the origins of the Proto-Indo-European language and the people. The identity of the Proto-Indo-Europeans has been a recurring topic in Indo-European studies since the 19th century. Many hypotheses for an Urheimat have been proposed, but none of them has gained general acceptance among the linguistic community. There is no single archaeological pattern that might correspond to a migration on an appropriate geographic scale throughout Europe, and all these explanations raise fundamental questions about the development, spread, and adoption of languages, the relationship of language to ethnic groups, and the correspondence of archaeologically recognizable patterns of material culture to either language or ethnicity.[1] As Mallory (1989:143) once put it: "One does not ask 'where is the Indo-European homeland?' but rather 'where do they put it now?'"
The only thing known for certain is that the language must have been differentiated into unconnected daughter dialects by the late 3rd millennium BC. Mainstream estimates of the time between PIE and the earliest attested texts (ca. 19th century BC; see Kültepe texts) range around 1,500 to 2,500 years, with extreme proposals diverging up to another 100% on either side:
These possibilities boil down to four competing basic models (with variations) that have academic credibility (Mallory (1997:106)), i.e.:
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There have been many attempts to claim that particular prehistorical cultures can be identified with the PIE-speaking peoples, but all have been speculative. All attempts to identify an actual people with an unattested language depend on a sound reconstruction of that language that allows identification of cultural concepts and environmental factors which may be associated with particular cultures (such as the use of metals, agriculture vs. pastoralism, geographically distinctive plants and animals, etc).
In the 1970s, a mainstream consensus had emerged among Indo-Europeanists in favour of the "Kurgan hypothesis" placing the Indo-European homeland in the Pontic steppe of the Chalcolithic period. This was not least due to the influence of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, edited by J. P. Mallory, that focused on the ideas of Marija Gimbutas, and offered some improvements. She had created a modern variation on the traditional invasion theory (the Kurgan hypothesis, after the kurgans (burial mounds) of the Eurasian steppes) in which the Indo-Europeans were a nomadic tribe in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia and expanded on horseback in several waves during the 3rd millennium BCE. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the horse. Leaving archaeological signs of their presence (see battle-axe people), they subjugated the peaceful European Neolithic farmers of Gimbutas's Old Europe. As Gimbutas's beliefs evolved, she put increasing emphasis on the patriarchal, patrilinear nature of the invading culture, sharply contrasting it with the supposedly egalitarian, if not matrilinear culture of the invaded, to a point of formulating essentially feminist archaeology.
Her interpretation of Indo-European culture found genetic support in remains from the Neolithic culture of Scandinavia, where bone remains in Neolithic graves indicated that the megalith culture was either matrilocal or matrilineal, as the people buried in the same grave were related through the women. Likewise, there is a tradition of remaining matrilineal traditions among the Picts. A modified form of this theory by JP Mallory, dating the migrations earlier to around 4000 BCE and putting less insistence on their violent or quasi-military nature, essentially replaced the version of Gimbutas.
The Kurgan hypothesis seeks to explain the Indo-European language expansion by a succession of migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, or, more specifically and according to the revised version, to the area encompassed by the Sredny Stog culture (ca. 4500 BC). This hypothesis is compatible with the argument that the PIE homeland must have been larger,[7] because the "Neolithic creolisation hypothesis" allows the Pontic-Caspian region to have been part of PIE territory.
The main competitor of the Kurgan hypothesis is the Anatolian hypothesis advanced by Colin Renfrew. It states that the Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BCE with the advance of farming (wave of advance). The expansion of agriculture from the Middle East diffused three linguistic families: Indo-European toward Europe, Dravidian toward Pakistan and India, and Afro Asiatic toward Arabia and North Africa. Essentially the same hypothesis was suggested by Cavalli-Sforza.[8] But this theory is contradicted by the fact that ancient Anatolia is known to be inhabited by non-Indo-European people, namely the Hattians and Chalybes. Also, the spread of farming does not seem to have been a uniform process or to have been achieved everywhere by population migration.
The accumulation of Archaeogenetic evidence which uses genetic analysis to trace migration patterns since the 1990s has also added new elements to the puzzle. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Alberto Piazza argue that Renfrew and Gimbutas reinforce rather than contradict each other. Cavalli-Sforza (2000) states that "It is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey." Piazza & Cavalli-Sforza (2006) state that:
if the expansions began at 9,500 years ago from Anatolia and at 6,000 years ago from the Yamnaya culture region, then a 3,500-year period elapsed during their migration to the Volga-Don region from Anatolia, probably through the Balkans. There a completely new, mostly pastoral culture developed under the stimulus of an environment unfavorable to standard agriculture, but offering new attractive possibilities. Our hypothesis is, therefore, that Indo-European languages derived from a secondary expansion from the Yamnaya culture region after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.
Wells (2002) states that "there is nothing to contradict this model, although the genetic patterns do not provide clear support either," and instead argues that the evidence is much stronger for Gimbutas' model:
while we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. There is clearly some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe.
High concentrations of Mesolithic or late Paleolithic Y-DNA 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.[9] Small Neolithic additions have been connected to occurrences of haplogroups J2, G, F and E3b1a (which are believed to have originated in Anatolia, the latter haplogroup in Northeastern Africa),[10][11] although such a position has been challenged as simplistic. Haplogroup R1a1, whose lineage is thought to have originated in the Eurasian Steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, is associated with the Kurgan culture,[12] as well as with the postglacial Ahrensburg culture that might have spread the gene originally.[13] On the other hand Dupuy and his colleagues proposed Ahrensburg culture to have brought Haplogroup Hg P*(xR1a) or R1b (Y-DNA) to the population and stressed genetic similarity with Germany.[14] Ornella Semino et al. propose a postglacial spread of the R1a1 gene during the Late Glacial Maximum, subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward.[15] R1a1 is most prevalent in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine and is also observed in Pakistan, India and central Asia. Wells suggests the origin, distribution and age of R1a1 points to an ancient migration, possibly corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion across the Eurasian steppe around 3000 BC. R1a1 is largely confined east of the Vistula [16] and drops considerably to the west: R1a1 measurements read 6.2% to Germans (a 4X drop to Czechs and Slovakians reading 26,7%) and 3.7% to Dutch.[17] The spread of Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup R1a1 has also been associated with the spread of the Indo-European languages, as well as a later, more regional spread associated with the Slavic expansions. The mutations that characterize haplogroup R1a occurred ~10,000 years bp. Its defining mutation (M17) occurred about 10,000 to 14,000 years ago.
Out of 10 human male remains assigned to the Andronovo horizon from the Krasnoyarsk region, 9 possessed the R1a Y-chromosome haplogroup and one C haplogroup (xC3). mtDNA haplogroups of nine individuals assigned to the same Andronovo horizon and region were as follows: U4 (2 individuals), U2e, U5a1, Z, T1, T4, H, and K2b.
90% of the Bronze Age period mtDNA haplogroups were of west Eurasian origin and the study determined that at least 60% of the individuals overall (out of the 26 Bronze and Iron Age human remains' samples of the study that could be tested) had light hair and blue or green eyes.[18]
A 2004 study also established that during the Bronze Age/Iron Age period, the majority of the population of Kazakhstan (part of the Andronovo culture during Bronze Age), was of west Eurasian origin (with mtDNA haplogroups such as U, H, HV, T, I and W), and that prior to the 13th-7th century BCE, all Kazakh samples belonged to European lineages.[19]
Using stochastic models to evaluate the presence/absence of different words across Indo-European, Gray & Atkinson (2003) yielded that the origin of Indo-European goes back about 8500 years, the first split being that of Hittite from the rest (Indo-Hittite hypothesis). However, the procedure to infer from the lifespan of some words upon the lifespan of a language remains at least questionable. Moreover, the idiosyncratic outcome of e.g. the Albanian language must raise severe doubts about both the method and the data. Besides, there are a lot of lexicostatistical (and some glottochronological) attempts before and after G&A with quite other results [20]
A scenario that could reconcile Renfrew's beliefs with the Kurgan hypothesis is that Indo-European migrations are somehow related to the submersion of the northeastern part of the Black Sea around 5600 BC:[21] while a splinter group who became the proto-Hittite speakers moved into northeastern Anatolia around 7000 BC, the remaining population went north, evolving into the Kurgan culture, while others may have escaped far to the northeast (Tocharians) and the southeast (Indo-Iranians). While the time-frame of this scenario is consistent with Renfrew, it is incompatible with his core assumption that Indo-European spread with the advance of agriculture.
