Еуразияның ежелгі тілдік қауымдары: Индоеуропалықтар жөніндегі болжамдар

Hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group

The Proto Indo Europeans are a hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto Indo European (PIE), the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo European language family. 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 period (6,400–3,500 BC). Mainstream scholars place them in the Pontic–Caspian steppe across Eurasia (this steppe extends from northeastern Bulgaria and southeastern Romania, through Moldova, and southern and eastern Ukraine, through the Northern Caucasus of southern Russia, and into the Lower Volga region of western Kazakhstan, adjacent to the Kazakh steppe to the east, both forming part of the larger Eurasian Steppe). Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the Middle Neolithic period (5500 to 4500 BC) or even the Early Neolithic period (7500 to 5500 BC) and suggest alternative origin hypotheses. By the early second millennium BC, descendants of the Proto Indo Europeans had reached far and wide across Eurasia, including Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (the linguistic ancestors of Mycenaean Greece), the north of Europe (Corded Ware culture), the edges of Central Asia (Yamnaya culture), and southern Siberia (Afanasievo culture).

In the words of philologist Martin L. West, "If there was an Indo European language, it follows that there was a people who spoke it: not a people in the sense of a nation, for they may never have formed a political unity, and not a people in any racial sense, for they may have been as genetically mixed as any modern population defined by language. If our language is a descendant of theirs, that does not make them ‘our ancestors’, any more than the ancient Romans are the ancestors of the French, the Romanians, and the Brazilians. The Indo Europeans were a people in the sense of a linguistic community. We should probably think of them as a loose network of clans and tribes, inhabiting a coherent territory of limited size." While 'Proto Indo Europeans' is used in scholarship to designate the group of speakers associated with the reconstructed proto language and culture, the term 'Indo Europeans' may refer to any historical people that speak an Indo European language.

Researchers have made many attempts to identify particular prehistoric cultures with the Proto Indo European speaking peoples, but all of such theories remain speculative. The scholars of the 1800s who first tackled the question of the Indo Europeans' original homeland (also called Urheimat, from German), had essentially only linguistic evidence. They attempted a rough localization by reconstructing the names of plants and animals (importantly the beech and the salmon) as well as the culture and technology (a bronze age culture that was centered upon animal husbandry and having domesticated the horse). The scholarly opinions became basically divided between a European hypothesis, which positted a migration from Europe to Asia, and an Asian hypothesis, which positted that the migration took place in the opposite direction. In the early 1900s, the question became associated with the expansion of a supposed "aryan race", a now discredited theory that was promoted during the expansion of European empires and the rise of "scientific racism". The question remains contentious within some flavours of ethnic nationalism (see also Indigenous Aryans). A series of major advances occurred in the 1970s due to the convergence of several factors. First, the radiocarbon dating method (invented in 1949) had become sufficiently inexpensive to be applied on a mass scale. Through dendrochronology (tree ring dating), 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, which is the most widely held theory as of 2017, depends upon linguistic and archaeological evidence, but is not universally accepted. It posits that the PIEs originated in the Pontic–Caspian steppe during the chalcolithic age. A minority of scholars prefer the Anatolian hypothesis, which posits an origin in Anatolia during the neolithic age. Other theories (Armenian hypothesis, Out of India theory, paleolithic continuity theory, and Balkan hypothesis) 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 (*aryo ) is the basis for Greek and Germanic word forms which seem only to denote the ruling elite of Proto Indo European (PIE) 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 1900s, the term "aryan" had come to be widely used in a racial sense, in which it referred to a hypothesized white, blond, and blue eyed superior race. The dictator Adolf Hitler called this race the "master race" (Herrenrasse), and, in its name, led massive pogroms in Europe. Subsequently, the term Aryan as a general term for Indo Europeans has been largely abandoned by scholars (though the term Indo Aryan is still used to refer to the branch that settled in Southern Asia).

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 that were ancestral to the later, still partially prehistoric, Bronze Age Indo Europeans. This is believed especially by those archaeologists who posit an original homeland of vast extent and immense time depth. However, this belief is not shared by most linguists, because 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.

The Kurgan (or Steppe) hypothesis was first formulated by Otto Schrader (1883) and V. Gordon Childe (1926), and was later systematized by Marija Gimbutas from 1956 onwards. The name originates from the kurgans (burial mounds) of the Eurasian steppes. The hypothesis suggests that the Indo Europeans, a patriarchal, patrilinear, and nomadic culture of the Pontic–Caspian steppe (which is now part northeastern Bulgaria and southeastern Romania, through Moldova, and southern and eastern Ukraine, through the northern Caucasus of southern Russia, and into the lower Volga region of western Kazakhstan), expanded into the area through several waves of migration during the 3rd millennium BCE, coinciding with the taming of the horse. Leaving archaeological signs of their presence (see Corded Ware culture), they subjugated the supposedly peaceful, egalitarian, and matrilinear European neolithic farmers of Gimbutas' Old Europe. A modified form of this theory, by J. P. Mallory, which dates the migrations to an earlier time (to around 3500 BCE), and puts less insistence upon their violent or quasi military nature, remains the most widely accepted theory of the Proto Indo European expansion.

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 (viz., Indo European expansion at the transition to the Late Bronze Age, including the possibility of Indo European Kassites). The Armenian hypothesis argues for the latest possible date of Proto Indo European (sans Anatolian), 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.

The Anatolian hypothesis, notably advocated by Colin Renfrew from the 1980s onwards, proposes that the Indo European languages spread peacefully into Europe from Anatolia from around 7000 BC with the advance of farming (wave of advance). The culture of the Indo Europeans as inferred by linguistic reconstruction raises difficulties for this theory, since early neolithic cultures lacked the horse, the wheel, and 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. Another argument, made by proponents of the steppe Urheimat (such as David Anthony) against Renfrew, points to the fact that ancient Anatolia is known to have been inhabited in the 2nd millennium BC by non Indo European speaking peoples, namely the Hattians (perhaps North Caucasian speaking), the Chalybes (language unknown), and the Hurrians (Hurro Urartian). Following the publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew subsequently acknowledged the important role of migrations of populations speaking one or several Indo European languages from the Pontic–Caspian steppe towards Northwestern Europe, noting that the DNA evidence from ancient skeletons "had completely rejuvenated Maria Gimbutas' kurgan hypothesis."

Archaeogenetics has allowed the use of genetic analysis to trace migration patterns.

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 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 (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan (курга́н), meaning tumulus or burial mound.

According to three autosomal DNA studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also very common in South Asia) would have expanded from the Pontic 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 Pontic steppes.

The subclade R1a1a (R M17 or R M198) is most commonly associated with Indo European speakers. Data so far collected indicate that there are two widely separated areas of high frequency, one in Eastern Europe, around Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, and the other in Southern Asia, around the Indo Gangetic Plain, which is part of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. 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 (M17) occurred about 10,000 to 14,000 years ago.

According to Jones et al. (2015) and , autosomal tests indicate that the Yamnaya people were the result of admixture between "Eastern Hunter Gatherers" from eastern Europe (EHG) and "Caucasus hunter gatherers" (CHG).

According to , "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 the Mal'ta Buret' culture, or other, closely related Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people from Siberia and to the Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG). 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. 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.

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.

David Reich (2018), noting the presence of some Indo European languages (such as Hittite) 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. (2018) and Damgaard et al. (2018), 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." 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. (2018) 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 (exemplified by R1a/R1b), as attested in the latest study on the Bell Beaker phenomenon." David W. Anthony in a 2019 analysis, criticizes the "southern" or "Armenian" hypothesis (addressing Reich, Kristiansen, and Wang). Among his reasons being: that the Yamnaya lack evidence of genetic influence from the Bronze Age or late neolithic Caucasus (deriving instead from an earlier mixture of Eastern European hunter gatherers and Caucasus hunter gatherers) 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 (the Yamnaya) in the Eastern European steppe north of the Caucasus, from a mixture of these two groups (EHG and CHG). He suggests that the roots of Proto Indo European ("archaic" or proto 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.