Proto-Indo-Europeans


The Proto-Indo-Europeans were a hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to linguistic reconstruction.
Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BC. Mainstream scholarship places them in the Pontic–Caspian steppe zone in Eastern Europe. Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic or even the early Neolithic, and suggest alternative location hypotheses.
By the early second millennium BC, descendants of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached far and wide across Eurasia, including Anatolia, the Aegean, the north of Europe, the edges of Central Asia, and southern Siberia.

Culture

Using linguistic reconstruction from old Indo-European languages such as Latin and Sanskrit, hypothetical features of the Proto-Indo-European language are deduced. Assuming that these linguistic features reflect culture and environment of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the following cultural and environmental traits are widely proposed:
Researchers have made many attempts to identify particular prehistoric cultures with the Proto-Indo-European-speaking peoples, but all such theories remain speculative.
The scholars of the 19th century who first tackled the question of the Indo-Europeans' original homeland, had essentially only linguistic evidence. They attempted a rough localization by reconstructing the names of plants and animals as well as the culture and technology. The scholarly opinions became basically divided between a European hypothesis, positing migration from Europe to Asia, and an Asian hypothesis, holding that the migration took place in the opposite direction.
In the early 20th century, the question became associated with the expansion of a supposed "Aryan race", a fallacy promoted during the expansion of European empires and the rise of "scientific racism". The question remains contentious within some flavours of ethnic nationalism.
A series of major advances occurred in the 1970s due to the convergence of several factors. First, the radiocarbon dating method had become sufficiently inexpensive to be applied on a mass scale. Through dendrochronology, pre-historians could calibrate radiocarbon dates to a much higher degree of accuracy. And finally, before the 1970s, parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia had been off limits to Western scholars, while non-Western archaeologists did not have access to publication in Western peer-reviewed journals. The pioneering work of Marija Gimbutas, assisted by Colin Renfrew, at least partly addressed this problem by organizing expeditions and arranging for more academic collaboration between Western and non-Western scholars.
The Kurgan hypothesis, the most widely held theory, depends on linguistic and archaeological evidence, but is not universally accepted. It suggests PIE origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the Chalcolithic. A minority of scholars prefer the Anatolian hypothesis, suggesting an origin in Anatolia during the Neolithic. Other theories have only marginal scholarly support.
In regard to terminology, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the term Aryan was used to refer to the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their descendants. However, Aryan more properly applies to the Indo-Iranians, the Indo-European branch that settled parts of the Middle East and South Asia, as only Indic and Iranian languages explicitly affirm the term as a self-designation referring to the entirety of their people, whereas the same Proto-Indo-European root is the basis for Greek and Germanic word forms which seem only to denote the ruling elite of Proto-Indo-European society. In fact, the most accessible evidence available confirms only the existence of a common, but vague, socio-cultural designation of "nobility" associated with PIE society, such that Greek socio-cultural lexicon and Germanic proper names derived from this root remain insufficient to determine whether the concept was limited to the designation of an exclusive, socio-political elite, or whether it could possibly have been applied in the most inclusive sense to an inherent and ancestral "noble" quality which allegedly characterized all ethnic members of PIE society. Only the latter could have served as a true and universal self-designation for the Proto-Indo-European people.
By the early twentieth century this term had come to be widely used in a racist context referring to a hypothesized white, blonde and blue eyed master race, culminating with the pogroms of the Nazis in Europe. Subsequently, the term Aryan as a general term for Indo-Europeans has been largely abandoned by scholars.

Urheimat hypotheses

According to some archaeologists, PIE speakers cannot be assumed to have been a single, identifiable people or tribe, but were a group of loosely related populations ancestral to the later, still partially prehistoric, Bronze Age Indo-Europeans. This view is held especially by those archaeologists who posit an original homeland of vast extent and immense time depth. However, this view is not shared by linguists, as proto-languages, like all languages before modern transport and communication, occupied small geographical areas over a limited time span, and were spoken by a set of close-knit communities—a tribe in the broad sense.
Researchers have put forward a great variety of proposed locations for the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Few of these hypotheses have survived scrutiny by academic specialists in Indo-European studies sufficiently well to be included in modern academic debate.

Pontic-Caspian steppe hypothesis

In 1956 Marija Gimbutas first proposed the Kurgan hypothesis. The name originates from the kurgans of the Eurasian steppes. The hypothesis suggests that the Indo-Europeans, a nomadic culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, expanded in several waves during the 3rd millennium BC. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the horse. Leaving archaeological signs of their presence, they subjugated the peaceful European neolithic farmers of Gimbutas' Old Europe. As Gimbutas' 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. A modified form of this theory by JP Mallory, dating the migrations earlier and putting less insistence on their violent or quasi-military nature, remains the most widely accepted view of the Proto-Indo-European expansion.

Armenian highland hypothesis

The Armenian hypothesis, based on the glottalic theory, suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 4th millennium BC in the Armenian Highland. This Indo-Hittite model does not include the Anatolian languages in its scenario. The phonological peculiarities of PIE proposed in the glottalic theory would be best preserved in the Armenian language and the Germanic languages, the former assuming the role of the dialect which remained in situ, implied to be particularly archaic in spite of its late attestation. Proto-Greek would be practically equivalent to Mycenean Greek and would date to the 17th century BC, closely associating Greek migration to Greece with the Indo-Aryan migration to India at about the same time. The Armenian hypothesis argues for the latest possible date of Proto-Indo-European, a full millennium later than the mainstream Kurgan hypothesis. In this, it figures as an opposite to the Anatolian hypothesis, in spite of the geographical proximity of the respective Urheimaten suggested, diverging from the time-frame suggested there by a full three millennia.

Anatolian hypothesis

The Anatolian hypothesis proposes that the Indo-European languages spread peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BC with the advance of farming. The leading propagator of the theory is Colin Renfrew. The culture of the Indo-Europeans as inferred by linguistic reconstruction raises difficulties for this theory, since early neolithic cultures had neither the horse, nor the wheel, nor metal, terms for all of which are securely reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European. Renfrew dismisses this argument, comparing such reconstructions to a theory that the presence of the word "café" in all modern Romance languages implies that the ancient Romans had cafés too. The linguistic counter-argument to this might state that whereas there can be no clear Proto-Romance reconstruction of the word "café" according to historical linguistic methodology, words such as "wheel" in the Indo-European languages clearly point to an archaic form of the protolanguage. Another argument against Renfrew is the fact that ancient Anatolia is known to have been inhabited by non-Indo-European Caucasian-speaking peoples, namely the Hattians, the Chalybes, and the Hurrians.
Following the publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew has accepted the reality of migrations of populations speaking one or several Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppe towards Northwestern Europe.

Genetics

The rise of archaeogenetic evidence which uses genetic analysis to trace migration patterns also added new elements to the origins puzzle.

Kurgan hypothesis

The Kurgan hypothesis 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, Eurasia and parts of Asia. It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language. The term is derived from the Russian kurgan, meaning tumulus or burial mound.

R1b and R1a

According to three autosomal DNA studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe would have expanded from the Russian steppes, along with the Indo European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo European Languages. Studies which analysed ancient human remains in Ireland and Portugal suggest that R1b was introduced in these places along with autosomal DNA from the Eastern European steppes.

R1a and R1a1a

The subclade R1a1a is most commonly associated with Indo-European speakers, although the subclade R1b1a has also been linked to the Centum branch of Indo-European. Data so far collected indicate that there are two widely separated areas of high frequency, one in Eastern Europe, around Poland and the Russian core, and the other in South Asia, around Indo-Gangetic Plain. The historical and prehistoric possible reasons for this are the subject of on-going discussion and attention amongst population geneticists and genetic genealogists, and are considered to be of potential interest to linguists and archaeologists also.
A large, 2014 study by Underhill et al., using 16,244 individuals from over 126 populations from across Eurasia, concluded there was compelling evidence, that R1a-M420 originated in the vicinity of Iran. The mutations that characterize haplogroup R1a occurred ~10,000 years BP. Its defining mutation occurred about 10,000 to 14,000 years ago. Pamjav et al. believe that R1a originated and initially diversified either within the Eurasian Steppes or the Middle East and Caucasus region.
Ornella Semino et al. propose a postglacial spread of the R1a1 haplogroup from north of the Black Sea during the time of the Late Glacial Maximum, which was subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward.

Yamnaya culture

According to Jones et al. and Haak et al., Yamnaya culture was exclusively R1b, autosomic tests indicate that the Yamnaya-people were the result of admixture between "Eastern Hunter-Gatherers" from eastern Europe and "Caucasus hunter-gatherers".
Each of those two populations contributed about half the Yamnaya DNA. According to co-author Dr. Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge:
An analysis by David W. Anthony also suggests a genetic origin of proto-Indo-Europeans in the Eastern European steppe north of the Caucasus, derived from a mixture of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus. Anthony also suggests that the proto-Indo-European language formed mainly from a base of languages spoken by Eastern European hunter-gathers with influences from languages of northern Caucasus hunter-gatherers, in addition to a possible later influence from the language of the Maikop culture to the south in the later neolithic or bronze age involving little genetic impact.
Eastern European hunter-gatherers
According to Haak et al., "Eastern European hunter-gatherers" who inhabited Russia were a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ~24,000-year-old Siberian from Mal'ta-Buret' culture, or other, closely related Ancient North Eurasian people from Siberia and to the Western Hunter Gatherers. Remains of the "Eastern European hunter-gatherers" have been found in Mesolithic or early Neolithic sites in Karelia and Samara Oblast, Russia, and put under analysis. Three such hunter-gathering individuals of the male sex have had their DNA results published. Each was found to belong to a different Y-DNA haplogroup: R1a, R1b, and J. R1b is also the most common Y-DNA haplogroup found among both the Yamnaya and modern-day Western Europeans.
Near East population
The Near East population were most likely hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus c.q. Iran Chalcolithic related people with a major CHG-component.
Jones et al. analyzed genomes from males from western Georgia, in the Caucasus, from the Late Upper Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic. These two males carried Y-DNA haplogroup: J* and J2a. The researchers found that these Caucasus hunters were probably the source of the farmer-like DNA in the Yamnaya, as the Caucasians were distantly related to the Middle Eastern people who introduced farming in Europe. Their genomes showed that a continued mixture of the Caucasians with Middle Eastern took place up to 25,000 years ago, when the coldest period in the last Ice Age started.
According to Lazaridis et al., "a population related to the people of the Iran Chalcolithic contributed ~43% of the ancestry of early Bronze Age populations of the steppe." According to Lazaridis et al., these Iranian Chalcolithic people were a mixture of "the Neolithic people of western Iran, the Levant, and Caucasus Hunter Gatherers." Lazaridis et al. also note that farming spread at two places in the Near East, namely the Levant and Iran, from where it spread, Iranian people spreading to the steppe and south Asia.

Northern and Central Europe

Haak et al. studied DNA from 94 skeletons from Europe and Russia aged between 3,000 and 8,000 years old. They concluded that about 4,500 years ago there was a major influx into Europe of Yamnaya culture people originating from the Pontic-Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea and that the DNA of copper-age Europeans matched that of the Yamnaya.

Bronze age Greece

A 2017 archaeogenetics study of Mycenaean and Minoan remains published in the journal Nature concluded that the Mycenaean Greeks were genetically closely related with the Minoans but unlike the Minoans also had a 13-18% genetic contribution from Bronze age steppe populations.

Anatolian hypothesis

and Alberto Piazza argue that Renfrew and Gimbutas reinforce rather than contradict each other. 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 and Cavalli-Sforza state that:
Spencer Wells suggests in a 2001 study that the origin, distribution and age of the R1a1 haplotype points to an ancient migration, possibly corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion across the Eurasian steppe around 3000 BC.
About his old teacher Cavalli-Sforza's proposal, 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:

Iranian/Armenian hypothesis

, noting the presence of some Indo-European languages in parts of ancient Anatolia, argues that "the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians." Yet, Reich also notes that "...the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet been published." Kristian Kristiansen, in an interview with Der Spiegel in May 2018, stated that the Yamnaya culture may have had a predecessor at the Caucasus, where "proto-proto-Indo-European" was spoken.
Recent DNA-research has led to renewed suggestions of a Caucasian homeland for the 'proto-Indo-Europeans'. According to Kroonen et al., Damgaard et al. ancient Anatolia "show no indication of a large-scale intrusion of a steppe population." They further note that this lends support to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, according to which both proto-Anatolian and proto-Indo-European split-off from a common mother language "no later than the 4th millennium BCE." Haak et al. states that "the Armenian plateau hypothesis gains in plausibility" since the Yamnaya partly descended from a Near Eastern population, which resembles present-day Armenians."
Wang et al. note that the Caucasus served as a corridor for gene flow between the steppe and cultures south of the Caucasus during the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age, stating that this "opens up the possibility of a homeland of PIE south of the Caucasus." However, Wang et al. also comment that the most recent genetic evidence supports an expansion of proto-Indo-Europeans through the steppe, noting: "but the latest ancient DNA results from South Asia also lend weight to a spread of Indo-European languages "via the steppe belt. The spread of some or all of the proto-Indo-European branches would have been possible via the North Caucasus and Pontic region and from there, along with pastoralist expansions, to the heart of Europe. This scenario finds support from the well attested and now widely documented 'steppe ancestry' in European populations, the postulate of increasingly patrilinear societies in the wake of these expansions, as attested in the latest study on the Bell Beaker phenomenon."
However, David W. Anthony in a 2019 analysis, criticizes the "southern" or "Armenian" hypothesis. Among his reasons being: that the Yamnaya lack evidence of genetic influence from the bronze age or late neolithic Caucasus and have paternal lineages that seem to derive from the hunter-gatherers of the Eastern European Steppe rather than the Caucasus, as well as a scarcity in the Yamnaya of the Anatolian Farmer admixture that had become common and substantial in the Caucasus around 5,000 BC. Anthony instead suggests a genetic and linguistic origin of proto-Indo-Europeans in the Eastern European steppe north of the Caucasus, from a mixture of these two groups. He suggests that the roots of Proto-Indo-European were in the steppe rather than the south and that PIE formed mainly from a base of languages spoken by Eastern European hunter-gathers with some influences from languages of Caucasus hunter-gatherers.

Physical appearance

The genetic basis of a number of physical features of the proto-Indo-European people were ascertained by the ancient DNA studies conducted by Haak et al., Wilde et al. and Mathieson et al. : they were genetically tall, overwhelmingly dark-eyed, dark-haired and had a skin colour that was moderately light, though somewhat darker than that of the average modern European.