“Most of human history is prehistory. Of the 200,000 or more years that humans have spent on Earth, only a tiny fraction have been recorded in writing. Even in our own little sliver of geologic time, the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose warm weather and relatively stable climate incubated the birth of agriculture, cities, states, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation, writing has been more the exception than the rule.”
“The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a philological phantasm and, like many ghosts, they have a habit of showing up all over the place. Would-be savants have located the PIE homeland everywhere from Scandinavia to the Tibetan Plateau to the North Pole, but in recent decades, scholarly consensus has converged around two origin stories for the PIE people.”
“One, most prominently argued by the British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, says that the Indo-Europeans originated somewhere on the edge of the Fertile Crescent. In this version, the key to the PIE people’s successes lay in their use of agriculture, which gave them a long-term edge over the surrounding hunter-gatherers. According to this theory, the expansion of Proto-Indo-Europeans began early, in the Neolithic, when people from Anatolia began to diffuse slowly, like a softly-heated gas.”
“The second leading theory of Indo-European origins, propounded most forcefully by the late Lithuanian-born archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and more recently, by the American archaeologist David W Anthony, is known as the Steppe Hypothesis. It tells us that the Indo-Europeans originated in the steppes of southern Russia, and spread out from there thanks to a combination of new adaptations, principally the horse and the wheel. This story begins much later than the Anatolian theory, in the Bronze Age instead of the Stone Age.”