Proto-Indo-Europeans

The **Proto-Indo-Europeans** (IE: **Prāmosindhueuropāyā**) were the prehistoric people of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the language that became the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to linguistic reconstruction.

Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BCE. Mainstream scholarship places them in
 the forest-steppe zone immediately to the north of the western end of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe. Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 BCE) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to 5500 BCE), and suggest alternative location hypotheses.
By the early second millennium BCE, offshoots of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached far and wide across Eurasia, including Anatolia (ancestors of the Hittites), the Aegean (the ancestors of Mycenaean Greece), the north of Europe (Corded Ware culture), the edges of Central Asia (Yamna culture), and southern Siberia (Afanasevo culture).

## Culture

See also: *Swedhuismos religion**, Proto-Indo-European religion, Proto-Indo-European culture, Swedhuismos culture*

The following basic traits of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their environment are widely agreed upon but still hypothetical due to their
reconstructed nature:

* pastoralism, including domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs
* agriculture and cereal cultivation, including technology commonly ascribed to late-Neolithic farming communities, e.g., the plow
* a climate with winter snow
* transportation by or across water
* the solid wheel, used for wagons, but not yet chariots with spoked wheels[4]
* worship of a sky god, *\*dyeus ph2tēr* (lit. "sky father"; > Sanskrit *Dyaus Pita*, > Ancient Greek *Ζεύς (πατήρ) / Zeus (patēr)*; vocative *\*dyeu-ph2ter* > Latin *Iūpiter*; Illyrian *Deipaturos*)
* oral heroic poetry or song lyrics that used stock phrases such as *ḱléwos ṇdhchitom* "imperishable fame"[2] and mari *woinokṛsnóm* "wine-dark sea"
* a patrilineal kinship-system based on relationships between men

The Proto-Indo-Europeans relied largely on agriculture, but partly on animal husbandry, notably of cattle and sheep.[*citation needed*] They had domesticated horses – \**éḱwos* (cf. Latin *equus*). The cow (*\*gwous*) played a central role, in religion and mythology as well as in daily life. A man's wealth would have been measured by the number of his animals (small livestock), *\*peḱu* (cf. English *fee*, Latin *pecunia*).

As for technology, reconstruction indicates a culture of the late Neolithic bordering on the early Bronze Age, with tools and weapons very likely composed of "natural bronze" (i.e.,
made from copper ore naturally rich in silicon or arsenic). Silver and gold were known, but not silver smelting (as PIE has no word for lead, a by-product of silver smelting), thus suggesting that silver was
imported. Sheep were kept for wool, and textiles were woven. The wheel was known, certainly for ox-drawn wagons.[*citation needed*]

They practiced a polytheistic religion centered on sacrificial rites, probably administered by a priestly caste.[*citation needed*]

Burials in barrows or tomb chambers apply to the Kurgan culture, in accordance with the original version of the Kurgan hypothesis, but not to the previous Sredny Stog culture, which is also generally associated with PIE. Important leaders would have been buried with their belongings in kurgans, and possibly also with members of their households or wives (human sacrifice, suttee).

Many Indo-European societies know a threefold division of priests, a warrior class, and a class of peasants or husbandmen. Georges Dumézil has suggested such a division for Proto-Indo-European society. If there was a separate class of warriors, it probably consisted of single young men. They would have followed a separate warrior code unacceptable in the society outside their peer-group. Traces of initiation rites in several Indo-European societies suggest that this group identified itself with wolves or dogs.

Whether these people regarded themselves as a linguistic or ethnic community cannot be known, nor by which name they may have referred to themselves. Though they may have called themselves the Teutónes (sing. Téutōn) from téutā, "people." Not to be confused with the Teutons, which refer to a Celtic or Germanic tribe described by Roman authors. This is evidence from the Germanic languages. German *Deutsch* "German" is from Old High German *diutisk*, *diutisc* (“popular, vernacular”), from Proto-Germanic *\*þiudiskaz* (“of the people, popular”), an adjective from Proto-Germanic *\*þeudō* (“people”) (compare Old English þeod), from Proto-Indo-European *\*tewtéh₂*.
Linguistics has allowed the reliable reconstruction of a large number of words relating to kinship relations. These all agree in exhibiting a patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social fabric. Patrilocality is confirmed by lexical evidence, including the word wedhtum, "to lead (away)", being the word that denotes a male wedding a female (but not vice versa). It is also the dominant pattern in historical IE societies, and matrilocality would be unlikely in a patrilineal society.

## History of Research

Researchers have made many attempts to identify particular prehistoric cultures with the Proto-Indo-European-speaking peoples, but all such theories remain speculative. Any attempt to identify an actual people with an unattested language depends on a sound reconstruction of that language that allows
identification of cultural concepts and environmental factors associated with particular cultures (such as the use of metals, agriculture vs. pastoralism, geographically distinctive plants and animals, etc.).[*citation needed*]

The scholars of the 19th century 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 centered on animal husbandry and having domesticated the horse). 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." [7] 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, as of 2017 the most widely held theory, depends on linguistic and archaeological evidence, but is not universally accepted.[8][9] It suggests PIE origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the Chalcolithic.[*citation needed*] A minority of scholars prefer the Anatolian hypothesis, suggesting an origin in Anatolia during the Neolithic. Other theories (Armenian hypothesis, Out of India theory, Paleolithic Continuity Theory, Balkan hypothesis) have only marginal scholarly support.[*citation needed*]

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-, so Aryan may in Indo-European be Aryós) 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 twentieth century this term had come to be widely used in a racist context referring to a hypothesized white *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 (though the term *Indo-Aryan* is still used to refer to the branch that settled in Southern Asia).

## Indo-European migrations

See also: *Indo-European migrations*

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.[12]

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.[13]

In 1956, Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) first proposed the Kurgan hypothesis. The name originates from the *kurgans* (burial mounds) of the Eurasian steppes. The hypothesis suggests that the Indo-Europeans, a nomadic culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe (now Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia), expanded in several waves during the 3rd millennium BCE. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the horse. Leaving archaeological signs of their presence (see battle-axe people), 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 (to around 3500 BCE) and putting less
insistence on their violent or quasi-military nature, remains the most widely accepted view of the Proto-Indo-European expansion.[note 4]

The second Indo-European expansion was during the Colonial or Early modern era (starting c. 1500), occuring in most notably in Asia, the Americas and Africa. It lasted through the Age of Discovery, the beginning of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1800) and ending around with the last territories getting independence from Britain, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, France and Belgium in 1945.

## Tribal Founder Mytheme

See also: *List of Indo-European tribes*

National gods are a class of guardian divinities or deities whose special concern is the safety and well-being of an ethnic group (*nation*), and of that group's leaders. This is contrasted with other guardian
figures such as family gods responsible for the well-being of individual clans or professions, or personal gods who are responsible for the well-being of individuals. These guardian roles augment the functions that a divinity might otherwise have (wisdom, health, war, and so on). One cross-cultural approach over this more than a millennium of historical speculation was to assign an eponymous ancestor of the same name as, or reconstructed from, the name of the people. For example, Hellen was the founder of the Hellenes. This is seen in various Indo-European tribes, there is no doubt that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had this mytheme across given tribes. Individual tribes would have fought another tribe (i.e. Suebi fighting the Saxons), or foreign peoples (Goths fighting the Romans).

Examples of the tribal founder mytheme include Gaut of the Geats, Gothus of the Goths, Saxnot of the Saxons, or Hellen of the Hellenes. Kings who achieved their good deeds that benefit the tribe, or won battles were probably deified as gods (i.e. Wiḱpotēs) after their death. The Roman Imperial cult is also an example of this. This mytheme is not exclusive to Indo-Europeans, it is spread world-wide. According to the *Kojiki* and *Nihon Shoki* in Japanese mythology, the Emperors of Japan are considered to be direct descendants of Amaterasu, but also Ashur of the Assyrians, or Amun and Horus for the Egyptians.

## Genetics

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

### Kurgan hypothesis

#### R1b and R1a

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 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.[19][20][21] 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.[22][23]

#### R1a1a

The subclade R1a1a (R-M17 or R-M198) is the most commonly associated with Indo-European speakers, although the subclade R1b1a (P-297) 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.[24] The mutations that characterize haplogroup R1a occurred ~10,000 years BP. Its defining mutation (M17) occurred about 10,000 to 14,000 years ago.[24]

Ornella Semino et al. propose a postglacial (Holocene) 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.[25]

#### Yamna culture

According to Jones et al. (2015) and Haak et al. (2015), Yamna culture was exclusively R1b, autosomic

 tests indicate that the Yamnaya-people were the result of admixture
between two different hunter-gatherer populations: distinctive "Eastern European hunter-gatherers" with high affinity to the Mal'ta-Buret' culture or other, closely related Ancient North Eurasian(ANE) people from Siberia[26] and to Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG) and a population of "Caucasus hunter-gatherers" who probably arrived from somewhere in the Near East, probably the Caucasus or Iran.[27][web 1] Each of those two populations contributed about half the Yamnaya DNA.[28][web 1] According to co-author Dr. Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge:

##### Eastern European hunter-gatherers

According to Haak et al. (2015), "Eastern European hunter-gatherers" who
inhabited Russia were 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 (ANE) people from Siberia and to the Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG).[26][web 1] 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.[28] R1b is also the most common Y-DNA haplogroup found among both the Yamnaya and modern-day Western Europeans.[26][29]

##### Near East population

The Near East population were most likely hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus (CHG)[27] c.q. Iran Chalcolithic related people with a CHG-component.[30]Jones et al. (2015) analyzed genomes from males from western Georgia, in the Caucasus, from the Late Upper Palaeolithic (13,300 years old)
and the Mesolithic (9,700 years old). 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.[web 1]
 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.[web 1]

According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), "a population related to the people of the Iran Chalcolithic contributed ~43% of the ancestry of early Bronze Age populations of the steppe."[30] According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), these Iranian Chalcolithic people were a mixture of "the Neolithic people of western Iran, the Levant, and Caucasus Hunter Gatherers."[30][note 5] Lazaridis et al. (2016) 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.[31]

#### Corded Ware

Haak et al. (2015) studied DNA from 94 skeletons from Europe and Russia aged between 3,000 and 8,000 years old.[32] They concluded that about 4,500 years ago there was a major influx into Europe of Yamna 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. The genetic basis of a number of features of the Yamnaya people were ascertained: they were genetically tall (phenotypic height is determined by both genetics and environmental factors), overwhelmingly dark-eyed (brown), dark-haired and had a skin colour that was moderately light, though somewhat darker than that of the average modern European:[33][34]

#### Andronovo

From the Corded Ware culture the Indo-Europeans spread eastward again, forming the Andronovo culture. Most researchers associate the Andronovo horizon with early Indo-Iranian languages, though it may have overlapped the early Uralic-speaking area at its northern fringe.[35] According to Allentoft et al. (2015), the Sintashta culture and Andronovo culture are derived from the Corded Ware culture.[36] According to Keyser et l. (2009), out of 10 human male remains assigned to the Andronovo horizon from the Krasnoyarsk region, nine possessed the R1a Y-chromosome haplogroup and one C-M130 haplogroup (xC3). Furthermore, 90% of the Bronze Age period mtDNA haplogroups were of west Eurasian origin and the study determined that at least 60% of the individuals overall (out of the 26 Bronze and Iron Age human remains' samples of the study that could be tested) had light
hair and blue or green eyes.[37][note 6] A 2004 study also established that during the Bronze Age/Iron Age period, the majority of the population of Kazakhstan (part of the Andronovo culture during Bronze Age), was of west Eurasian origin (with mtDNA haplogroups such as U, H, HV, T, I and W), and that prior to the 13th–7th centuries BCE, all samples from Kazakhstan belonged to European lineages.[38]

### Anatolian hypothesis

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Alberto Piazza argue that Renfrew and Gimbutas reinforce rather than contradict each other. Cavalli-Sforza (2000)
 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 (2006) 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 BCE.[39]

About his old teacher Cavalli-Sforza's proposal, Wells (2002) 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:

While we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. There is clearly *some* genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe.

## References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National\_god

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaterasu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early\_modern\_period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_ancient\_Germanic\_peoples#Mythical\_founders