The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Early

Descendants: Proto-Languages and

Homelands
By Robert Lindsay

The Indo-European languages include most of the languages

of Europe, Iran and Northern India. For instance, English,
Gaelic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German,
Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian,
Belarussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian,
Russian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Kurdish are some of
the better-known IE languages of Europe and the Near East.

In Iran, the major language, Farsi, is IE, as is the major

language Pashto in Afghanistan. In India and Pakistan, the
huge languages Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are all IE.

They go back to a proto-language called Proto Indo-

European, or PIE. In that the languages are all related, the
truth is that the peoples are all related to for the greatest
part. So Northern Indians, Pashtuns, Iranians, Kurds and
Armenians are all closely related to Europeans since they all
sprung in part from a common source, in the famous words
of Sir William Jones, who discovered the IE languages in the
late 1700's.

Going back 6,500 years, we can reconstruct Proto-Indo-

European quite well. One of the best resources is Julius
Pokorny's Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (or
Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch).

Originally written in German, this incredible 2,500-page

masterwork has been translated largely, but not completely,
into English. One of my favorite pastimes is wading through
this monster.
The homeland of the Indo-Europeans is the subject of much
debate, but the modern consensus centers on putting the
homeland at 6500 years before present (YBP) around
Southern Russia. I have narrowed it to southern Russia,
southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Kazakhstan north of
the Caucasus. This is more or less the region in between the
Black and Caspian Seas.

An arid region called the Kuma-Manych Depression is in the

middle of this region and seems to be a major center of PIE
culture. I could not find a map of the Depression, but it
separates the North Caucasus from the Russian Plain.

There were also settlements in southeastern Ukraine near

the Sea of Azov, about 50 miles north of the Caspian Sea in
southwestern Kazakhstan and up around the Lower Volga
Region near Samara. A good word for this general region is
the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

The homeland of the Proto Indo-Europeans, as of 6,500

YBP. I looked around for good maps of the PIE homeland
but I could not find any, so I drew my own. Copyright
Oakhurst Technology 2009.
From there, it's not really known how or when the Proto-
Indo-Europeans spread out, but they show up in Europe
some time later. A good map of their migrations or
conquests is here.

The PIE people had several advantages over their neighbors.

They were already into the Bronze Age for one, and not only
that, but there were horses running around Southern Russia.
The PIE had managed to domesticate the horse. That's quite
an advantage, but the PIE people did one better.

They even invented a wheel. Then they logically put the two
together and made horse-drawn chariots. With these
chariots, the PIE people apparently conquered much of
Europe and later parts of Southwest Asia and South Asia.

The people in Europe at this time were pre-PIE folks. We

know little about their culture, but the master of PIE culture,
the celebrated professor Marija Gimbutas calls it "Old
Europe." Old Europe is very little known or understood. A
probable surviving language from Old Europe is Basque.
Another, long extinct, is Etruscan.

The very early people of the British Isles, whose

descendants are now known as the Black Irish, populated
the Isles between 9,000-11,000 YBP. They had dark hair,
dark eyes and very pale skin. Genetically, they seem to
resemble the Basques and may have come on boats from
Spain.

The Basques themselves and related peoples may have

come from the Caucasus long, long ago. Although Basque is
said to have no living relatives, I believe it is related to
Caucasian languages like Chechen and Ingush.

Gimbutas is also the founder of the Kurgan Hypothesis,

which is currently the best PIE theory out there. Gimbutas
(photo) sort of lost it towards the end when she got into
"Goddess worship", but it's clear that this Lithuanian
archeologist was one of the great scholars of our time.

Some time after 6500 YBP, PIE began to break up, but no
one knows quite how this occurred. At any rate, by 4200
YBP, a split had occurred in PIE and a separate language had
broken off, Indo-Iranian. There are maps out there of the
Indo-Iranian homeland, but I don't like them all much so I
made my own. My best guess was to place it in the far north
of Kazakhstan and just over the border into Russia.

From there, after 3500 YBP, the Indo-Aryans moved out and
migrated into Afghanistan, Pakistan, North India and Iran.
Many people in these regions today speak Indo-Iranian
languages descended from these people. These folks are
thought to be the source of the famous Aryan Invasion of
India at around this time.

A map of the Indo-Iranian Homeland in far northern

Kazakhstan around 3500 YBP. This is where the Iranians,
Afghans, North Indians and many Pakistanis came from.
Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
As I noted, the process whereby these languages split off,
other than the Indo-Aryan split, is little known. However,
assuming this tree diagram is correct, maybe it can shed
some light on the matter.

A very interesting tree diagram of the IE language family.

Click to enlarge.

Unfortunately, this chart is hard to read, so I will try to

decipher it. The first thing to note is the Anatolian split in
the tree, apparently the first split. There are problems with
the date for PIE. A glottochronological study recently gave a
date of about 8,500 YBP for PIE, considerably earlier than
the usual date of around 6,500 YBP.

Promoters of something called the Anatolian Hypothesis

have used this to suggest than an earlier language called
Proto-Indo-Hittite was spoken in Anatolia 8,500 years ago.

The Anatolian languages split off, and the PIE speakers

moved to the Pontic Steppe. The movement of Proto-Indo-
Hittite speakers out of Anatolia to the Pontic Steppe to form
the PIE people may be related to the Black Sea Deluge
Theory, which has recently been proven correct.

The Black Sea expanded dramatically according to this

theory as, around 7,600 YBP, a waterfall 200 times the size
of Niagara Falls (!) poured through the Bosporus Straits,
transforming the pre-Black Sea freshwater lake into the
present-day brackish (part-salt water, part-fresh water)
Black Sea. Soon after this event, PIE culture appears in the
Pontic Steppe.

This is a very controversial proposal called the Indo-Hittite

Theory, but I have long supported it. The late Joseph
Greenberg, one of the greatest historical linguists that ever
lived, also supported it.

This theory holds that Indo-European has two branches,

Indo-European proper and the Hittite branch. The Hittite
branch is related to the other branch only in a binary
fashion. There is good evidence for this.

The Anatolian languages, all of which are now extinct, are

very strange and seem distant from the rest. They appear
archaic and have retained many forms that seem to not be
present on the rest of IE. My guess is these are archaic
forms.

Anatolian lacks grammatical gender - masculine:feminine,

an IE innovation spread through the family. Instead, it has
an archaic noun class system called animate:inanimate. This
is reminiscent of ancient Niger-Congo languages in Africa. In
addition, the Anatolian vowel system is reduced (fewer
vowels) and the case system is simpler.

Many basic IE vocabulary terms are simply missing in

Anatolian. All of this debris tends to add up to the
hypothesis of an ancient branch of the language family.
Tocharian is visible on the diagram as Italo-Celtic-Tocharian.
This branch is extremely strange, since Tocharian was in
Asia near East Turkestan and Kyrgyzstan, and Celtic and
Italic are spoken in the heart of Europe. This is the area
where the mummies with blond hair and blue eyes have
been found. Tocharian may have split as early as 6000 YBP.

The Tocharian language is also very ancient and strange and

is only distantly related to the rest of IE. If anything, it
seems to look somewhat like Anatolian.

A very ancient branch of IE also split off around this time.

Known as Balkan or Paleo-Balkan, it may also have split off
6000 YBP. There were two major branches, Thracian and
Illyro-Venetic. Thracian is extinct, and all that remains of
Illyro-Venetic is Albanian, a very ancient IE tongue that is
only distantly related to the rest of IE. Proto-Illyrian and
Thracian split around 4200 YBP.

Here is a map of the Illyrian tribes before the Roman

conquest. It is from this milieu that the Albanians emerged.
The Albanian language is quite strange within IE and seems
to have very ancient roots dating back to Proto-Paleo-Balkan
from 6000 YBP.

Another very early split you can see in the chart is

something called Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic. The Armeno-
Hellenic branch probably split off 6000 YBP. Only the Greek
languages and Armenian remain of this family, as most of
the family is extinct.

Proto-Hellenic may have split off around 5000 YBP, and

Proto-Armenian may have split around 4500 YBP. The proto-
Hellenics seem to have been related to the Indo-Iranians.
Armenian and Hellenic are also strange IE branches that are
only distantly related to the rest of IE.

The Italo-Celtic branch broke off as early as 5000 YBP.

Proto-Celtic split about 2800 YBP; the homeland is in
Northern Austria. The Hallstatt Culture is associated with
them. The Proto-Italics are dated to around 3500 YBP in
Italy. Before that, the Italo-Celtic Homeland is thought to
have been in southern and central Germany, Poland and
Czechoslovakia.

Proto-Germanic also dates far back, with pre-Proto-

Germanic possibly being spoken 3800 YBP in northern
Germany, Denmark and Southern Scandinavia (map). The
homeland of the pre-proto-Germanics is in Southern Sweden
and Jutland. They may have settled this area as early as
5000 YBP. These speakers may have been speaking
something called Balto-Slavo-Germanic, a group you can see
on the tree above.

Proto-Germanic proper probably dates from the Jasdorf

Culture. The homeland of the proto-Germanics was in
northern Germany, around Schleswig-Holstein south into the
Lower Elbe region in what is now Saxony-Anhalt and the
Hanover area.

It also extended along the Baltic coast of Germany to about

the Polish border, down into Brandenburg and Mecklenburg.
The original center of the homeland was in Schleswig-
Holstein and Lower Saxony.

Balto-Slavic is also a very ancient branch of IE. Lithuanian is

an ancient IE language that is very conservative and has
retained many ancient IE reflexes that have been lost in the
rest of IE. Proto-Balto-Slavic probably split around 4000
YBP. Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic split apart about 3400
YBP. Map of the Balto-Slavic homeland. This homeland
encompassed Western Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Poland.

Proto-Slavic, dating from 3400 YBP, seems to have its

homeland in Northern and Western Ukraine and in Southern
Belarus.
The proto-Baltic homeland dating from the same time frame
is about the southern border region of Belarus around the
Pinsk Marshes.

The rest of the splits, of Slavic, Italic, Celtic, Indian, Iranian

and Germanic into their branches, are pretty well
documented, and all occur within the past 1500-3000 years.

Let us move to some interesting dilemmas about the Indo-

Europeans. One is the distribution of R1a associated with the
Indo-Europeans.

The map of the R1a lineage showing high concentrations in

Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

The highest levels of this haplogroup are found in Eastern

Europe in a narrow band from the Black Sea in the Ukraine
through Poland to the Baltic Sea and in Northern India and
areas to the northwest around the Hindu Kush and the
Pamirs, but that does not mean that these two groups are
particularly closely related. Northern Indians are most
closely related to Iranians and relatively distantly to Eastern
Europeans.

The truth is that this haplogroup is only a signature of a split

from around the Aryan-Greco homeland in the Pontic Steppe
region discussed above. This left high levels of R1a in
Eastern Europe and in north India. High levels in North India
are not particularly notable but exist only due to a founder
effect. Actually, the highest levels are not found in North
India but in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and north Afghanistan.

The high levels found in North India have led some to

assume incorrectly that the homeland of the R1a people was
in that area, but this is not the case.

A map of R1b DNA distribution. The homeland of the R1b

line is the Maykop Culture, shown in the shaded pink region
between the Caspian and Black Seas.

R1b levels are highest in Spain and the Western British

Isles. The launching point for the R1b seems to have been
the Maykop Culture of 5500 YBP. From there, they spread all
over Europe.

The Maykop Culture was an early PIE split that existed

between the Taman Peninsula just east of the Crimea east to
the Dagestan border in the area that includes part of
Southern Russia east of the Crimea, Adygea, Karachay-
Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia
and Chechnya in the Caucasus.

The center of the culture was around Maykop in Adygea

(Circassia). The region is now inhabited by peoples of the
Caucasus and is heavily Muslim.

An explanation:
The Proto-Indo-Europeans belonged both R1a and
R1b. Their homeland was in the Pontic-Caspian
steppe, in what is known as the Kurgan culture
(7000-2200 BCE).

The presence of R1b in modern times between the

Black Sea and the Caucasus hints at the Maykop
culture (3500-2500 BCE) as their most plausible
homeland, while the Eurasian steppes to the north
were R1a territory. [...]

A comparison with the Indo-Iranian invasion of

South Asia shows that 40% of the male lineages
of northern India are R1a, but only 20% of the
female lineages could be of Indo-European origin
(H, J, K, T, U).

The impact of the Indo-Europeans was more

severe in Europe because European society 4,000
years ago was less developed in terms of
agriculture, technology (no bronze weapons) and
population density than that of the Indus Valley
civilization.

This is particularly true of the native Western

European cultures where farming arrived much
later than in the Balkans or central Europe. Greece
was the most advanced of European societies and
was the least affected in terms of haplogroup
replacement.

Native European Y-DNA haplogroups (I1, I2a, I2b)

also survived better in regions that were more
difficult to reach or less hospitable, like
Scandinavia, Brittany, Sardinia or the Dinaric
Alps[...]

The eastern branch of the R1a steppe people was

the Andronovo culture (2300-1000 BCE), around
 modern Kazakhstan, which corresponds to the
Indo-Iranian branch of languages. Their migration
to the south have resulted in high R1a frequencies
in southern Central Asia, Iran and the Indian
subcontinent.

The highest frequency of R1a (about 65%) is

reached in a cluster around Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
and northern Afghanistan. In India, 15 to 45% of
the population is R1a, depending on the region
and caste. Over 70% of the Brahmins (highest
caste in Hinduism) belong to R1a1, due to a
founder effect.

References

Pokorny, Julius. 1959, 2007. Proto-Indo-European

Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius
Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch.
Published on the Internet: Indo-European Language Revival
Association.