Michael William Denney © The Aryan conquest theory and the controversial ''Out of India'' theory are both wrong. Both of these opposite theories are operating from faulty, outdated and disproven assumptions about the origins of the Indo-European language. A third option is now emerging based on the ''Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm'' which says that the first Indo-Europeans originated in Africa over 50,000 years ago. So, the first Indo-Europeans did not emerge in Asia, Anatolia, India or Europe. They came from paleolithic African ancestors who were dark skinned. The ''out of India'' proponents have also adopted this faulty assumption that the IE languages have an ethnic connection. The foundational premise is incorrect, therefore the whole discussion needs to be re-analyzed. The Paleolithic Continuity Theory (or PCT, Italian La teoria della continuità), since 2010 relabelled as the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (or PCP), is a hypothesis suggesting that the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic, several millennia earlier than the Chalcolithic or at the most Neolithic estimates in other scenarios of Proto-Indo-European origins. Its main proponent are Marcel Otte, Alexander Häusler, Mario Alinei. Alinei advanced the theory in his Origini delle Lingue d'Europa (Origins of the Languages of Europe), published in two volumes in 1996 and 2000. The PCT posits that the advent of Indo-European languages should be linked to the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia from Africa in the Upper Paleolithic. Employing ''lexical periodization'', Alinei arrives at a timeline deeper than even that of Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis. HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis reverses the Kurgan hypothesis and largely identifies the Indo-Europeans with Gimbutas's ''Old Europe.'' PCT reassigns the Kurgan culture (traditionally considered early Indo-European) to a people of predominantly mixed Uralic and Turkic stock. This hypothesis is supported by the tentative linguistic identification of Etruscans as a Uralic, proto-Hungarian people that had already undergone strong proto-Turkic influence in the third millennium BC, when Pontic invasions would have brought this people to the Carpathian Basin. A subsequent migration of Urnfield culture signature around 1250 BC caused this ethnic group to expand south in a general movement of people, attested by the upheaval of the Sea Peoples and the overthrow of an earlier Italic substrate at the onset of the ''Etruscan'' Villanovan culture. KURGAN HYPOTHESIS -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Those scholars who follow Gimbutas identify a ''Kurgan culture'' as reflecting an early Indo-European ethnicity which existed in the steppes and southeastern Europe from the 5th to 3rd millennia BC. Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan hypothesi

• published: 28 Dec 2014
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