Questions about Proto-Indo-Europeans
Short answers, pulled from the story.
Who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans and where did they live?
The Proto-Indo-Europeans were a postulated prehistoric ethnolinguistic group who spoke Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Mainstream scholars place them in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a region stretching from northeastern Bulgaria and southeastern Romania through Moldova, southern Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and into the lower Volga region of western Kazakhstan. They likely lived during the Late Neolithic period, roughly 6400 to 3500 BC.
What is the Kurgan hypothesis about Proto-Indo-European origins?
The Kurgan hypothesis, first formulated by Otto Schrader in 1883 and later systematized by Marija Gimbutas from 1956, proposes that Proto-Indo-European speakers originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and expanded outward in waves during the 3rd millennium BC, coinciding with the domestication of the horse. J. P. Mallory's modified version, which dates the migrations to around 3500 BC and de-emphasizes their violent character, remains the most widely accepted account as of 2017.
What did Proto-Indo-European culture look like based on linguistic reconstruction?
Linguistic reconstruction from old Indo-European languages such as Latin and Sanskrit indicates that the Proto-Indo-Europeans practiced pastoralism with domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs, and cultivated cereal crops using the plow. They used solid-wheeled wagons, worshipped a sky god whose name reconstructs as *Dyeus Ph2ter (the root of Zeus, Iupiter, and Dyaus Pita), and composed oral heroic poetry using stock phrases including "imperishable fame." A 2016 phylogenetic study also argued that the folktale known as The Smith and the Devil dates to the Proto-Indo-European period and implies they had metallurgy.
What does ancient DNA reveal about Proto-Indo-European ancestry?
Jones et al. (2015) found that the Yamnaya people, widely identified with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, descended from roughly equal contributions of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and Caucasus hunter-gatherers. A study examining 94 ancient skeletons concluded that around 4,500 years ago, a massive influx of Yamnaya-culture people moved into Europe, and four Corded Ware individuals in that dataset traced three-quarters of their ancestry to the Yamnaya. A 2017 study in Nature found that Mycenaean Greeks carried a 13-18% genetic contribution from Bronze Age steppe populations, unlike the Minoans.
What is the Anatolian hypothesis for Proto-Indo-European origins?
The Anatolian hypothesis, notably advocated by Colin Renfrew from the 1980s, proposes that Indo-European languages spread peacefully from Anatolia into Europe beginning around 7000 BC, carried by the advance of Neolithic farming. Critics point out that securely reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary includes terms for the horse, the wheel, and metals, none of which early Neolithic cultures possessed. Renfrew himself acknowledged in 2015 that ancient DNA evidence had significantly strengthened Marija Gimbutas' competing Kurgan hypothesis.
Why did scholars stop using the term Aryan to describe Proto-Indo-Europeans?
By the early 20th century, the term Aryan had been repurposed in popular usage to describe a hypothesized white, blond, and blue-eyed superior race. Adolf Hitler called this race the Herrenrasse and used the concept to justify massive pogroms in Europe. Following that catastrophe, scholars largely abandoned Aryan as a general term for Indo-Europeans. Linguistically, the term more properly applies to the Indo-Iranians, the branch that settled parts of the Middle East and South Asia, where Indic and Iranian languages use it as an explicit self-designation.