Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses
Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses are attempts to identify the Urheimat, or primary homeland, of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. Such hypotheses often consider glottochronology and how cultural, biological, and geographical items reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European fit the archaeological record.
The mainstream consensus among Indo-Europeanists favors the "Kurgan hypothesis", which places the Indo-European homeland in the Pontic steppe of the Chalcolithic period (4th to 5th millennia BCE). The Pontic steppe is a large area of grasslands in far Eastern Europe, located north of the Black Sea, Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea and including parts of eastern Ukraine, southern Russia and northwest Kazakhstan. This is the time and place of the earliest domestication of the horse, which according to this hypothesis was the work of early Indo-Europeans, allowing them to expand outwards and assimilate or conquer many other cultures.
The Kurgan hypothesis was formulated by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s, and gained mainstream currency beginning in the 1970s. The primary competitor is the Anatolian hypothesis, which proposes that the dispersal of Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia, as part of the expansion during the Neolithic revolution in the seventh and sixth millennia BC. First advanced in 1987 by Colin Renfrew, the Anatolian hypothesis has been popular among archaeologists but linguists have by and large preferred the Kurgan pastoralist model.
