Combined Anatolian-Kurgan hypothesis 

I now think that the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in present-day Turkey.  Yet the Kurgan culture does play an important role in the evolution of Indo-European languages.  I think it was founded by Indo-Europeans which immigrated to the Pontic steppe.  The ones which did not leave were cultural ancestors of the speakers of Anatolian languages.  The language of the Kurgan culture gave rise to all other Indo-European languages.  These include all the ones spoken today.

There were several early splinter groups from the Kurgan culture.  Three of these were the cultural ancestors of the Armenians, Greeks and Albanians.  There may have been more but the languages descended from theirs are so poorly documented we don’t know much of them.

A larger splinter group from Kurgan culture was the Beaker people.  This metalworking pastoral people spread over much of Europe.  The areas were they settled includes almost all of West-Central Europe, the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas, the large islands between them, the British Islands, Southern Scandinavia and probably parts of Eastern Europe north of the grasslands.  With such a widespread culture they soon developed several different languages.  These were ancestral of the Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic and Italic (including Romatic) ones.

The Kurgan people themselves developed into the Proto-Indo-Iranians, many of which returned to the Middle East.  With the Aryan migration to northern India the Indo-Aryan languages eventually splintered from the Iraniac ones.  This happened not long before these two peoples started to write as Avestan and Vedic are relatively similar.

What do you think about this hypothesis?  No “the Urheimat must be my country because we are the most superior/unique/original” argument, please!  No people in the world are intrinsically superior to any other ones.  It is questionable if any people are “uniquely unique”.  The most original of the living Indo-European languages is probably Lithuanian.  Yet no-one who is not a Lithuanian have seriously suggested the Indo-European Urheimat to be in Lithuania.

2015-01-03 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.