An Anatolian Homeland For Indo-European?

That may be, but the part about “proto-Europeans” coming from the Lower Volga is bullshit. All archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, and genetic evidence (not to mention, evidence from indigenous pagan religions/mythologies) point to an Anatolian origin of the Indo-Europeans.

During the LGM, European hunter-gatherer groups gathered in some refugia in South Central Europe (Iberia, Western Balkans, Ukraine…) and Northern Europe was almost entirely covered in glaciers, as were the Alps, Caucasus, Pyrenees, and other major mountain ranges.

After the LGM, the scant remnant of Upper Paleolithic survivors moved back north, but Southern Europe was depopulated, only to be repopulated again by Near Eastern agriculturalists at the dawn of the Neolithic. These agro-pastoralists from the Anatolian-Levantine refugium brought farming, livestock, and copper to Europe. Among the earliest farmers were the Anatolian proto-Indo-Europeans.

The Basques are probably remnants of the Mesolithic survivor population. The purest descendants of these Near Eastern settlers are the Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, and at least some Italians – also the Turks, who inhabit the PIE origin land – ironically Turks, who speak a non-Indo-European Altaic language, are probably more Indo-European than most Indo-European speakers, especially Brits or Indians.

Of course, there were other migrations around that time. A people closely related to the Mongols expanded westward across Siberia, over the Urals and into Scandinavia following the deglaciation. They introduced Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Lappish) into Europe, and the Lapps are their most direct descendants.

But we have strong reason to believe that Indo-European spread from the Near East (most likely North-Central Anatolia) chiefly due to agriculture, not from Western Europe (as some White Nationalists might believe), from India/Pakistan (as many Hindu nationalists believe), or from Gimbutas’ fanciful Kurgan patriarchs (which Wikipedia deems as “official” and which you appear to take for granted).

[Actually, it surprises me that so many people take for granted some nutty hypothesis proposed by the Marxist-feminist Jewess Marija Gimbutas despite the lack of evidence or historical precedent. At least the Paleolithic Continuity Model is based on some evidence (albeit misinterpreted), and the Out-of-India hypothesis is based on understandable wishful thinking.]

Consider the following:

* As per your own model, virtually all Europeans cluster closely with each other and with Persians, Kurds, Caucasus folks, Jews, Turks, and some Semitic-speaking Levantines. Basques, North Africans, Arabs, and “West Asians” (i.e. Afghans) are minor outliers.

This interrelatedness suggests a strong demic diffusion and also implies that the stat that Europeans are 8

* While Indo-Europeans are/were indeed fairly heavily male-dominated (Gimbutas was at least correct about this), this follows from a Near Eastern origin, as the Middle East was, and still is, very patriarchal. Ironically, Gimbutas located the homeland of those “evil patriarchal invaders” who decimated the “feminist utopia” that neolithic European society (allegedly) was in Scythia, which is believed to be the source of the Amazon legends…

* Indo-European languages show relatively strong affinities to Semitic languages, and probably Kartvelian and Pelasgian languages (the latter may have actually been Indo-European, related to Hittite), possibly Ligurian (probably Indo-European and related to both Celtic and Italic languages), and even Etruscan (controversially). No such closeness to Iberian (Basque), Ural-Altaic, or Dravidian languages.

* The oldest evidence of Indo-European languages comes from Anatolia (Hittite) and the Aegean (Greek in Linear B). Minoan (in Linear A) remains undeciphered and may have been related. Archaeological records demonstrate a settled native population.

* Even the pagan religions seem to cluster near the Anatolian center. Zoroastrianism and the Indic religions both descend from the Indo-Aryan religion, but the Persian religion is more similar to ancient European religious traditions than the Dharmic faiths are (because Hinduism absorbed some Harappan/Dravidian pre-Aryan influences.)

Greco-Roman and Germanic religions were more alike than either was akin to Celtic (Druidic) paganism, the Celts being more matriarchal and probably influenced by relatives of the Basques in Western Europe and the British Isles.

All this points to an origin for Indo-European in Neolithic Anatolia, but you are probably correct that the Aryans (Indo-Iranians, not blonde Germanic supermen) came into Iran and India via Central Asia. Most likely route being a clockwise migration around the Caspian Sea…

Excellent commentary, fascinating stuff.

I actually agree with an Anatolian homeland for PIE, however, I also agree with a secondary spread from the Lower Volga. So things are complicated. In fact, I argue that Indo-European is actually Indo-Hittite, with Anatolian being so far removed from the rest that it is actually a sister to the rest of the family. Just a look at Hittite shows you how archaic it is compared to the rest of the family.

The part about the Turks, Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, and at least some Italians being the remnants of the original IE people is probably true. So, in a sense, these are really the “original Whites.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nordicists.

Gimbutas’ theory has always ween a bit nutty. There were no ancient matriarchies. As a female friend once said, men have always ruled. Why? She answered, “Men are bigger, men are stronger, men push women around and make them do what they want them to do.” Well, of course, and women are too weak to fight back.

As it is now, as it’s always been. In gender relations, it’s the law of the jungle. I also feel that matriarchies might have been inherently unstable, as I’m not sure that “female rule” works very well. We are having enough problems with what matriarchy we have in the West.

Patriarchy or male rule is sort of a bad deal for women, but at least it seems to “work.” And I have noticed that women from patriarchal cultures seem to be happiest in their femininity and in general. The men are masculine, the women are feminine, and everyone’s happy.

The more women rule, the more miserable women seem to be, and men never seem to be happy under female rule. For one thing, oddly enough, female rule tends to make women act masculine and men act feminine.

Neither is a normal role model, and I argue that the more masculine a woman is, the more unhappy she is, and the more feminine a man is, the more unhappy he is. That ‘s possibly because they are violating nature itself. When you do that, nature fights back, possibly by making you miserable.

Surely IE is related to Afro-Asiatic and Kartvelian, but I disagree that it is less related to Uralic or Altaic, and I also disagree that Uralic and Altaic represent some family. Ligurian and Pelasgian are probably IE, but no one knows what Etruscan is.

I definitely agree that almost all Europeans are quite close to Persians, Kurds, Caucasus folks, Jews, Turks, and some Semitic-speaking Levantines. It is interesting how close the Caucasians are to each other. Most Caucasians are much closer to each other than other major races are. There is much larger differentiation among NE and SE Asians, Aborigines, Papuans and for sure Africans than there is among Caucasians.

All around, a great comment. The rest of you may feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts or anything to add.

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12 thoughts on “An Anatolian Homeland For Indo-European?”

  1. “A people closely related to the Mongols expanded westward across Siberia, over the Urals and into Scandinavia, following the deglaciation. They introduced Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Lappish) into Europe, and the Lapps are their most direct descendants.”

    This is rubbish. The Uralic relation to Mongolian or Altaic was a part of Nordicist ideology (those Germanic folk wanted to claim blue eyes exclusively for themselves so non-Aryan blue eyed peoples needed another origin) and Finnish nationalist propaganda (lacking a glorious warrior history the best you can do is claim to be a distant cousin of the Great Khan and hey, isn’t it pretty convenient if other lost cousins of Finns just happen to be the Turks, the Japanese and the Manchus who were ruling China… it just so happens that Finnish activists found a “relation” to every populous group that might become an enemy of Russia, hmm, really lucky coincidence). There’s no actual evidence whatsoever of either a genetic or a language link, which is pretty damn weak since there actually is a good DNA lineage link between all Uralic-speakers.

    Proto-Uralic has well-established language contact (but not necessarily relation) with proto-Indo-European which means wherever you put the proto-Uralic people, you put the proto-Indo-Europeans next to them or vice versa. This is generally considered a key piece of evidence against deep Siberian origin for Uralic since no one wants to put proto-Indo-Europeans in Siberia. Of course it also makes evidence against too southern or western origin of p-IE since nobody thinks it’s plausible to put Uralic languages in Iraq or Iberia. Putting both near the Black Sea works fine.

    Deglaciation left northern Europe open *eons* before Mongolian or Uralic or Indo-European people were even close to existing and from corpse finds we know it was all populated as soon as there was stuff to eat, long before present language families. Whatever people first populated northern Europe spoke some now completely extinct language families and they were later replaced or assimilated by Uralic and Indo-European speakers. The same logic applies to IE and Uralic, the fringe populations like British and Scandinavians probably look the least like the first IE speakers and the fringe Uralic populations are the least likely to look like the “originals”..

    1. Thx for this!

      I put the Uralic homeland at around the southern Urals, correct? There is Samoyedic however. Is it not quite distant from the rest. And is Yukaghir not Uralic, and why is it so distant?

      I agree that there is no such thing as Uralo-Altaic. However, I believe there is a relationship between the two groups, however, it is not any greater than the closeness between say Uralic and IE.

    2. All similarities between Proto-Uralic and IE can be explained by contact with Proto-Indo-Iranian. Per my model, PIE was spoken originally in Anatolia and split in 2 big branches, basically those that migrated to the steppes (Gimbutas’ theory) and those who didn’t. The ones that remained were ancestral to Anatolian, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Italic and Celtic (and perhaps Tocharian), while the ones that migrated were ancestral to Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian.

      You should also check out the new theory that Uralic ancestors came from Manchuria, as apparently Uralic-like cultural remnants were found buried there, and genetic tests of the samples indicated a strong connection. Uralic obviously came from Siberia, since it’s apparently related to Yukaghir and Eskimo-Aleut, and clearly shares A LOT of areal features with the ‘Altaic’ languages (and possibly is also deeply related to them).

      After migrating from Siberia, the Uralic people came into contact with the Germanic-Balto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian mesh, which provided the commonalities. Germanic and Balto-Slavic were also heavily influenced by them, so much that one can argue that they were originally Uralic speakers that got Indo-Europeanized.

      I completely disagree with the notion that PIE was related to any ‘Uraloaltaic’ language, since on linguistic, historical and anthropo-genetic grounds it makes no sense.

  2. The usual place to put the Uralic homeland is in the region where the Volga, Don and Ural rivers come close together since that explains all the known contacts and explains the known historical spread of Uralic languages very well. It’s pretty well established that it’s at least how the Finnic branch of Uralic colonized Eastern Europe, expanding and filling everything on the upper parts of the Volga system and then eventually hopping over the watershed to the rivers that drain into the Baltic. Then later Germanic/Baltic/Slavic expansion ate most of the area and Uralic survived only in fringe pockets and permanent east-west-warzones like Finland that changed hands so often that the locals never managed to assimilate.

    The Caspian Sea round trip of the Indo-Aryan branch of IE is right there in Finnic languages, with plenty of Indo-Aryan loanwords in Finnish and Saami too, tracing to the time when the Finn-Saami ancestral population was still living in the upper reaches of the Volga system and talking to the Indo-Aryans just south of them.

    The Samoyeds are not that distant at all, immediately neighbouring Finns and Saamis in Europe. They migrated westward from Siberia though, after picking up reindeer herding from somewhere and getting the tools to actually colonize the tundra. Seems like the Saamis picked up herding by absorbing a bunch of Samoyeds a few hundred years ago – Uralic people have not historically been herders and the only reason Saamis got associated with herding is that the herders are the only Saamis that didn’t get assimilated by Finns and Scandinavians. There’s plenty of common Uralic vocabulary for reindeer and hunting but none for herding.

    Yukaghir is not Uralic but it’s one of the languages that people keep trying to add to the family. Since they’ve been trying for a century now they probably can’t prove it either way ever

  3. Both Renfrew and Gimbutas may have been right. Gimbutas gives the IE a northshore of the BlackSea as the epicenter of the PIE tribes at the time AT THE TIME/S of dispersal, c. 4000 BC to 2000 BC. Renfrew states that the PIE urheimat was in northern Asia Minor, but much earlier, c. 7000 BC. My theory was both were correct. The bulk travel NE and ended up on the Northern shores of the Blacksea, eastwards to north of the Caspian and up to 55deg N latitude. This would account for the more archaic character of Hittite and the lack of separate masc. & fem. grammatical gender. They had a 2 gender, a common (masc/fem) & neuter. Furthermore, pure racial dolichcephalic people of the mediterannen race carry incipient genes for hair & eye blondism. The more northerly latitudes, and even similar latitudes without a mild mediterranean climate such as the Black &Caspian Seas and areas north would help causes depigmentaion laws, enormously enhanced by selective mating. As a general rule, the closer to the equator (all things being equal) the darker the people. Yes, there are exceptions, but minor. I’d imagine at the time of diffusal from the kurgan-area, they the majority were already Nordic, & .this same, gracile, Nordic type, the founders, or at least the IE-speech bringers to Europe, Iran, etc. were about 50% blond, 90% non dark-eyed and 80% dolichcephalic the rest mesocephalic, w/ no brachycephalic members.

    1. After rereading the above (well-written) theories, I’d like to add and clarify. I believe that the PIE speech was most likely a hybrid of three languages. (NB I’m not a geneticist, archaeology, but I have have the equivalent of a doctorate in Germanic general philology, post-doctoral knowledge in north-Gmc, Ingvaeonic, and in hypothetical Proto-Gmc dialect linguistics and reconstruction. I’ve taught myself thru cassettes, books, college-friends (CSU Fresno, where Robert got his MA) from Norway (it’s [bokmål, east-Dano-Norw] the same language as Swedish.) I’ve been to Sweden (and on several of those trips, I eurailed thru the Netherlands, I landed, and have landed at Schipol 5 times) up to Oslo with an old classmate fro FSU, we and some other FSU alumni whom I knew or had met in Fresno (no alumnae present as we all in our 20s, Oslo had a target-rich hunting-field of willing feminie, beautiful Nordic females, with their most descriptive and their important adjective/noun about them “libertine”. Oslo had a world-famous nightlife back in 1989, I was 25, didnt look like the MODEST, intellectual, language-obsessed pedant I was and am. The only thing that equals my love for languages is women, a close frontrunner is backpacking in the Alpine High Sierra or any alpine mtn’s. After a few days of libidinous partying, I needed a break, and I needed to get my southern European travel eccoutrements left in storage in Amsterdam. Most importantly the city was a sleepy little burg…..I’m being facetious. After a week I w/ fellow Fresnan 18-year-old, tall, NordoFälisch Jarret Morris whose mom is from Nordholland, actually we’d flown over with 2 of his great-aunts on their way back home to Scheveninge. [skhayfeninguh] The Dutch love me for just being able to pronounce this. We traveled by train nonstop, except for stops for changing trains. We took a trans-Alpine night-train thru Austria, stupid, I saw nothing of the Alps, stupider yet, did same on return. This trained arrived Bolgna mid-morning. We then got on the final Brindisi-bound train, full of fellow eurailers and interrailers. I could see Greece was gonna be fun, besides boning up on my Greek language, and seeing some of the famous classical ruins, I’d be boning also. (I fully admit I have digressed from my intended point and this has become a nostalgic trip into memory-lane, and a gratuitous paen to myself. BUT….BUT, it does show that I’m not just book-learned but been physically present to Hellas, seen, and socialized with its people, I was surprised to see so many Greeks with dark-blond hair and light eyes, but they still had Greek faces and appeared brachycephalic in NW Greece as Epriots have a strong alpinid strain. The hair/eye-blondism is native, probably of the original Achaeans, et alii (not alia which is a Latin neut. Plur.). The Achaeans, known to Egypt as “Ekwesh”, Hittites as “Ahhiywa” were described as long-haired blond warriors with steely blue eyes. Skeletal evidence shows their nordo-mediterranid IE origins, they were all dolicocephalic to mesocephalic. DNA shows they were R1b, Indo-Europeans, some postulate an Anatolian Achaean afterhome and
      staging area for their conquest of “Greece” their afterhome was adjacent
      to the Hittite kingdom and Hittite kings accepted Achaean kings as peers. These Achaeans are likely candidates for the marauding pirates of early antiquity who harried the eastern Med. They had an extreme warrior-hero ethos, introduced a patrilineal system, brought the typical IE skygods, the usual disdain and extreme hatred of Mother Earth cults, native to so many of the non-IE peoples of Old Europe. They also had the IE hallmark roundshield, scrammaseax (the eponymous “seax” shortsword used by Saxons) and brooch. Some believe they came from an afterhome in the Danube basin as the Dorians (most of whom were brachycephalic thru non-IE alpine admixture, races just don’t change osteological metrics en masse by anything other than admixture in such a short time as the period of time elapsed from the PIE BlackSea staging-
      area to their Danubian afterhome thence to Greece was at most 2000 years, not enough time for endogamous osteomorphism. Soft parts and pigment are far more pliable caused by several stimuli, such as climate. To reiterate, the original IE predominant racial time was that of either an eastern Nordic (like actor Gudanov) or the virtually identical Hallstatt found only in pure populations in very large national percentages in central Sweden and in the eastern valleys north of Oslo. It is believed that many nordics of the same type were predominant among ancient Finns. Going back, PIE is most like a melange of 3 phyla, Altaic, Caucasian and Afro-Asiatic. PIE mythology so identically mirrors Altaic it must mean a common, not borrowed origin. I believe the Pontic steppe latter homeland was huge, bound on its south by the CaspianSea & BlackSea northward to lat. 55 N, and well into central Asia (Siberia) to places like the western Chinese Tarim basin where all the mummies, some dating back to 1800 BC were all dolichocephalic or mesocephalic europids, some with blond or red hair and belonging to the same DNA groups as PIE. This would help contradict the statement in one of the posts above that the Indo-Aryans who founded Persia much later than 1800 BC that they were a non-Nordic branch of IEs. Certaintly not every single PIE person had blond hair and light eyes, but they were all non-brachycephalic Mediterrids the vast majority of whom had gone through the prose of extreme melanin-loss due to their northerly home, even the northern shore of the BlackSea, at 43 N, even with southern OR, is not extreme to cause this, but other than the Crimean Peninsula with its mild Mediterranean climate, most of the BlackSea has continental climates with long snowy winters. But this was only the SW area, it extended up to 55 N, same lat. as Ystad, in extreme southern Sweden. But the PIE northern parts of the latter urheimat were no moderated by the Gulfstream that gives western Europe, the British Isles, southern Scandinavian its temperate, Cfc (Köppen) climate. The PIE had no moderating effects from the Atlantic, had an extremely long and cold winter, less direct sunlight. It had a Dfd climate, subpolar, long harsh winters, cool, short summer, no dry season. Same thing into the NE parts of the latter urheimat. Again, let me reiterate that this process happened in other white non-IEs. Why not the Inuit, Mongols, etc. Well they have gone thru climate-caused changes, their skin is white and native hair- and eye-blondism not unknown. But they lacked several things, first, they carried not the incipient, totally native genes for blond hair, blue eyes found in all pure Med peoples around the Mediterranean and the Middl-East. This shows up in 2 to 5% of Meds, often yielding a spontaneous fully Nordic individual. The Mongols, etc. were not white and had no such genes. Second, as the depigmentation began, it became to be seen as a hallmark of the people, our tribe. Selective mating, fair-complected people were considered more attractive. This could speed up the pigmentlossprocess to as short as 20 generations, where if no selective mating had occurred it would’ve taken 20K years.

  4. I’ve heard Anatolian farmers were very similar to Greeks. A group I don’t hear of often is Natufian. I’ve heard they’re a Greek/Anatolian type as well but were conquered by Semites in the Levant.

    1. I believe that Natufians are located in Palestine. Jericho is supposed to be an ancient Natulfian settlement, I believe.

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