Talk:Proto-Indo-European homeland

the sforza citation is inaccurate, and i've removed all mention of it until the issue can be addressed
sforza's theory is not in line with renfrew's, but with gimbutas'. his principal component analysis saw three waves into europe, including a neolithic wave (associated with gimbutas' old europe, not with pie) and a very, very strong chalcolithic wave from the steppes (associated with pie). this renders renfrew's argument confused. the expansion he speaks of happened, but sforza suggests it is *not* associated with pie.

advocates of renfrew's theory are often dishonest. it's essentially a modified flood story, so they're dealing with strong religious convictions. please defer to legitimate experts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.48.181.80 (talk • contribs) 28 march 2015 (UTC)

Edits 9 December about Anthony (2024)
What does the second is the position retained mean? And how can Anthony be publishing in 2024, when in my part of the world it’s still 2023? Sweet6970 (talk) 16:26, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Anthony is a visionary, isn't he? ;) Joshua Jonathan  -  Let's talk!  17:28, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It's the language used in the paper. Perhaps it could be alternately worded as something like "supported", "preferred", "argued for" or something similar. Skllagyook (talk) 18:07, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I wondered whether saying the ‘position’ was ‘retained’ meant that it was the ‘view’ ‘held’. ‘Preferred’ or ‘supported’ would make sense, provided that fits with the context. Sweet6970 (talk) 21:17, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I have changed ‘retained’ to ‘supported’. Sweet6970 (talk) 12:32, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

ad infinitum
''The most widely accepted proposal about the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland is the steppe hypothesis, which puts the archaic, early, and late PIE homeland in the Pontic–Caspian steppe around 4,000 BCE. The leading competitor is the Anatolian hypothesis, which puts it in Anatolia around 8,000 BCE. A notable third possibility, which has gained renewed attention due to aDNA research in the 2010s, is the Armenian hypothesis, which situates the homeland for archaic PIE south of the Caucasus.''

The Steppe hypothesis is not 'widely cited' anymore, and actually poorly supported by anything, by almost all accounts for several years. Based on the works of professional scholars in the field from Harvard and Max Plank, the most parsimonious hypothesis, which has emerged based on ancient DNA, is the "south Caucasus" hypothesis. This includes the nexus region between Armenia, NW Iran, and Eastern Turkey. Even if Steppe theory was still widely 'cited', it is very weakly supported by contemporary accounts of scholars with prominence in the field. 2601:882:101:1A0:9874:5131:AB08:764C (talk) 22:08, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * To my knowledge, this characterization is false. I'm aware of Heggarty et al.'s recent hybrid hypothesis paper, but you're going to need to actually cite the reams of recent work demonstrating a shift from Kurgan to the Anatolian hypothesis—or whichever derivation or variant.— Remsense  诉  07:19, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

2601:882:101:1A0:9874:5131:AB08:764C -- As long as a critical mass of linguists who specialize in Indo-European linguistics do not endorse a competing hypothesis, then the generalized overall Steppe hypothesis still has scholarly viability. It's been very noticeable that hypotheses based solely on archaeology and/or genetic analysis, ignoring or disregarding linguistic evidence, have had a series of fluctuations and ups and downs since the 1980s. Anything that's based solely on the work of archaeologists or genetic analysts, ignoring linguistics, is unlikely to hold up over the long term... AnonMoos (talk) 07:31, 20 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Heggarty et al. is a linguistic paper written by the greatest Indo-European linguists in the world. 5.211.196.169 (talk) 08:14, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
 * It was not written by the greatest Indo-European linguists in the world. Sure, there are names like Kim, Kümmel and Pronk (apologies to others I have forgotten to mention), but their role in shaping this paper was to feed the database and make cognate decisions—as always in life: don't forget to read the small print! (In this case: the "Acknowldgements" on pages 11 and 12.) Interpretation of the data is still very much a Russell Gray thing. –Austronesier (talk) 21:29, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

New Article!
Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans 89.198.134.228 (talk) 04:28, 20 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Nice! if I understand correctly, the map in the article can be uploaded to Wikipedia?  Joshua Jonathan  -  Let's talk!  05:43, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Sister article: A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Joshua Jonathan  -  Let's talk!  06:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't think so, unfortunately. Both papers are licensed CC BY-NC-ND – the "NC" and "ND" parts are incompatible with Commons licensing.
 * Let's also not rush to incorporate these references into articles. They're preprints of cutting edge, primary research; it'll likely be years before they filter into the secondary sources we should be using. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 07:26, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Anti-scientific treatment of IE theories
The Palaeolithic Continuity Paradigm is a very serious proposal and needs a better treatment. "Fringe" is an adjective of gossip and not a scientific one. It would damage the scientific quaracter of Wikipedia. PCI having a separate entry was much better. Kostandisloukos (talk) 17:48, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * It certainly was considered quite seriously at one time. But what is the evidence it is still widely accepted? The history of this is discussed in the article. If you see errors, or if you can think of recent sources which we can use, then please make more specific remarks.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:35, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * In this recent edit an IP moved that theory from a point above to a point below the Fringe Theories heading. We might revert that change, but I think we need to arrive at a consensus on it. The theory is not widely accepted now, but the term "fringe" might not be appropriate for that theory. Just because it is no longer widely accepted does not necessarily mean it is fringe. The theories that are clearly fringe are those that are predicated on nationalistic rather than scientific grounds - that is, they are pseudoscientific. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 21:03, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The exisiting PCP literature has a walled-garden character and I hardly see the PCP mentioned anywhere in IE specialist literature. If we can't label it "fringe" in the absence of secondary sources that do so, we should think about whether the very mention of the hypothesis actually borders on WP:UNDUE. –Austronesier (talk) 21:35, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think it has an important role in the history of this topic. (I tend to think topics are often best explained by explaining the history of the topic. Science is normally best seen as an ongoing discussion, so from that perspective on WP we are generally trying to summarize a snapshot, but snapshots are best understood by providing context.) One of the biggest problems with this theory is that it made little sense linguistically, even though it was about languages. It was an attempt to equate a technological dispersion with a language family's dispersion.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:02, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * It is a good question whether it is due at all. It certainly is too detailed. How about cutting to this: That last sentence could be tweaked, but should be there. This provides just enough context to know what it is, without all that undue mention of its proponents. I would not suggest describing it as fringe unless there are sources that do so. I am not wholly opposed to striking it all out. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 12:08, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think it has an important role in the history of this topic. I'm not sure whether it ever had. If something hardly gets any mention outside of a walled garden of literature with circular citations (i.e. it is patently ignored my mainstream historical linguists), why does it merit a mention in a general interest encyclopedia? The idea of IE languages being indigenous (back to the pre-Neolithic) to the areas of Europe where they are spoken now was of course always there and a priori not entirely implausible, especially in the time before we got more information about Holocene population movements from archeogenetics. But a full-blown hypothesis (complete with a programmatic label "Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm") that defies almost everything we know about language change and traces the IE family back to the Paleolithic is the brainchild of Alinei, a crackpot who believed that Etruscan is related to Hungarian and wrote stuff like this in 2006(!): No individual, in normal conditions (i.e. in conditions of social stability), experiences grammatical change in the course of his life. In normal conditions, on the contrary, each of us experiences that her/his language is the same of her/his grand-parent, and is the same spoken by her/his grandchildren. Each of us experiences, in short, the continuity and the conservation of language through five generations: two before and two after ours. The only law inherent to language is conservation: a law comparable, to a certain extent, to Newton’s law of inertia. But the cause of this impossibility to experience linguistic change in the course of one’s life must not be attributed to the slowness of grammatical change, but simply to the absence of changing factors in what I have defined as a socially normal context. ("Darwinism, traditional linguistics and the new Palaeolithic Continuity Theory of Language Evolution", Mario Alinei, 2006) . But as a middle ground, I'm good with 's text for the sake of containment, provided we have at least one secondary source from outside the walled garden that makes an assessement of the hypothesis. If the only secondary source actually attests the utter insignificance of the PCP, I see no reason to keep a mention here. –Austronesier (talk) 07:55, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
 * ...and wrote stuff like this in 2006... I guess he is not a reader of Victorian novels. Or maybe it's the modern novel that he doesn't like. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 09:15, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry guys. I have made a mistake here. I was thinking of Renfrew's version which is of course in Mallory.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:47, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I have found a secondary source and trimmed the text based on Sirfurboy's suggestions, with an addition with should speak for itself (I'd hate to add a SYNTH-ish "however" clause). –Austronesier (talk) 09:59, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Of course, Alinei is not only attacking a strawman in the quoted passage (linguists are not claiming that language change primarily happens in the course of the life of a single individual), and worse, he's not even correct (people can and do experience grammatical change in their own speech in the course of their life), he's also misrepresenting "normal" conditions: the co-existence of languages and regional dialects (both in communities and individuals) is an almost ubiquitous condition, and quite likely the primary driver (or trigger) of language change. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 07:41, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure whether I've encountered this theory before, but the obvious point is that if the classic 1980s Anatolian theory has the problem that there doesn't seem to be enough linguistic differentiation among IE languages in Europe to correspond to 8,000 years of geographic dispersion, then this problem would be magnified threefold for the PCP. I don't know whether that makes it "fringe", but it's a significant blow to its basic plausibility. AnonMoos (talk) 11:33, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:48, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Especially if you consider the earliest attestations, which are around 2000–4000 years old. And that's not the only problem with the Anatolian hypothesis that is amplified with the PCT. The time-depth is just ridiculously implausible, particularly if you accept even the slightest bit of linguistic-paleontology-type argument (the café counter is absurd because it ignores the role of language change, especially sound change, that makes loans detectable). People with no hands-on experience with language data and centuries-spanning developments (such as in North Germanic, where they can be traced back very far) do tend to assume that language change is that slow, so the concept may appear plausible to them, but to experienced historical linguists the idea is far-fetched at best.
 * And especially when you consider that the PCT also rejects the accepted history of the Romance languages, you've got to conclude that "fringe" doesn't even begin to describe it. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 07:41, 5 May 2024 (UTC)