page_title: Italic peoples
section_title: Early and Middle Bronze Age
hierarchical_section_title: Italic peoples / History / Early and Middle Bronze Age
caption_attribution_description: English: Indo-European Migrations. Source David Anthony (2007), The Horse, The Wheel and Language
context_page_description: The Italic peoples were an Indo-European ethnolinguistic group identified by their use of Italic languages.
  The Italic peoples descended from Indo-Europeans who migrated into Italy in the second millennium BC. Latins achieved a dominant position among these tribes, establishing ancient Roman civilization. During this development, other Italic tribes adopted Latin language and culture in a process known as Romanization. This process was eventually extended to much of Europe. The ethnic groups which emerged as a result are known as Romance peoples.
context_section_description: According to David W. Anthony, between 3100–3000 BCE, a massive migration of Indo-Europeans from the Yamnaya culture took place into the Danube Valley. Thousands of kurgans are attributed to this event. These migrations probably split off Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic and Pre-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European. By this time the Anatolian peoples and the Tocharians had already split off from other Indo-Europeans. Hydronymy shows that the Proto-Germanic homeland was in Central Germany, which would be very close to the homeland of Italic and Celtic languages as well. The origin of a hypothetical ancestral "Italo-Celtic" people is to be found in today's eastern Hungary, settled around 3100 BCE by the Yamnaya culture. This hypothesis is to some extent supported by the observation that Italic shares a large number of isoglosses and lexical terms with Celtic and Germanic, some of which are more likely to be attributed to the Bronze Age. In particular, using Bayesian phylogenetic methods, Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson argued that Proto-Italic speakers separated from Proto-Germanics 5500 years before present, i.e. roughly at the start of the Bronze Age. This is further confirmed by the fact that the Germanic language family shares more vocabulary with the Italic family than with the Celtic language family.
  From the late third to the early second millennium BCE, tribes coming both from the north and from Franco-Iberia brought the Beaker culture and the use of bronze smithing, to the Po Valley, to Tuscany and to the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily. The Beakers could have been the link which brought the Yamnaya dialects from Hungary to Austria and Bavaria. These dialects might then have developed into Proto-Celtic. The arrival of Indo-Europeans into Italy is in some sources ascribed to the Beakers. A migration across the Alps from East-Central Europe by Italic tribes is thought to have occurred around 1800 BCE.
  In the mid-second millennium BCE, the Terramare culture developed in the Po Valley. The Terramare culture takes its name from the black earth (terra marna) residue of settlement mounds, which have long served the fertilizing needs of local farmers. These people were still hunters, but had domesticated animals; they were fairly skillful metallurgists, casting bronze in moulds of stone and clay, and they were also agriculturists, cultivating beans, the vine, wheat and flax. The Latino-Faliscan people have been associated with this culture, especially by the archaeologist Luigi Pigorini.
caption: Indo-European Migrations. Source David Anthony (2007). The Horse, The Wheel and Language
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