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The Proto-Indo-European homeland was the prehistoric linguistic homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). From this region, its speakers migrated east and west, and formed the proto-communities of the different branches of the Indo-European language family.
The most widely accepted proposal about the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland is the steppe hypothesis,[note 1] which puts the archaic, early, and late PIE homeland in the Pontic–Caspian steppe around 4000 BCE.[1][2][3][4][5] A notable second possibility, which has gained renewed attention during the 2010s and 2020s due to aDNA research, is the Armenian hypothesis, which situates the homeland for archaic PIE ('Indo-Hittite') south of the Caucasus mountains.[6][7][8][9][10][11] Another contender is the Anatolian hypothesis, which puts it in Anatolia c. 8000 BCE.[1][12][13][14] Several other explanations have been proposed, including the outdated but historically prominent North European hypothesis, the Neolithic creolisation hypothesis, the Paleolithic continuity paradigm, the Arctic theory, and the "indigenous Aryans" (or "out of India") hypothesis. These are not widely accepted, and are considered to be fringe theories.[15][2][16]
The search for the homeland of the Indo-Europeans began during the late 18th century with the discovery of the Indo-European language family.[17] The methods used to establish the homeland have been drawn from the disciplines of historical linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology and, more recently, human population genetics.
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- ^ a b Mallory & Adams 2006.
- ^ a b Anthony 2007.
- ^ Pereltsvaig & Lewis 2015, pp. 1–16.
- ^ Anthony & Ringe 2015.
- ^ Haak et al. 2015.
- ^ Haak et al. 2015, p. 138, Supplementary Information.
- ^ Reich 2018, p. 177.
- ^ Damgaard 2018, p. 8.
- ^ Wang et al. 2018, p. 10.
- ^ Grolle 2018, p. 108.
- ^ Lazaridis I, et al. (2022). "The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe". Science. 377 (6609): eabm4247. doi:10.1126/science.abm4247. ISSN 0036-8075. PMC 10064553. PMID 36007055. S2CID 251843620.
- ^ Renfrew, Colin (1990). Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. CUP Archive. ISBN 9780521386753.
- ^ Gray & Atkinson 2003.
- ^ Bouckaert et al. 2012.
- ^ Trautmann 2005, p. xiii.
- ^ Parpola 2015.
- ^ Pereltsvaig & Lewis 2015, pp. 19–38.