The Home of the Indo-Europeans.

It is obvious that if the languages just described represent the progressive differentiation of an original speech, this speech, which we may for convenience call the Indo-European language, must have been spoken by a population somewhere at some time. What can be learned of these people and their early location?

Concerning their physical character, practically nothing can be discerned. Continuity in language and culture does not imply biological descent. It is not an uncommon phenomenon in history for a people to give up their own language and adopt another.

Sometimes they adopt the language of their conquerors, or of those whom they have conquered, or that of a people with whom they have simply become merged in a common territory. The Indo-European languages are spoken today in many cultures that until recently have had completely unrelated heritages. And to judge by the large variety of people who have spoken these languages from early times, it is quite possible that the people of the original Indo-European community already represented a wide ethnic diversity. Neither can we form any very definite idea of the date at which this people lived as a single, more or less coherent community. The period of their common life must have extended over a considerable stretch of time. It is customary to place the end of their common existence somewhere between 3500 and 2500 B.C.
With respect to the location of this community at a time shortly before their dispersal, we have at least a basis for inference. To begin with, we may assume that the original home was in that part of the world in which the languages of the family are chiefly to be found today, and we may omit from consideration Africa, Australia, and the American continents because we know that the extension of Indo-European languages in these areas
has occurred in historical times. History and its related sciences, anthropology and archaeology, enable us also to eliminate certain other regions, such as the British Isles and the peninsulas of Southern Europe. Early literary tradition occasionally preserves traces of a people at a former stage in their history. The earliest books of the Hindus, for example, the Vedas, show an acquaintance with the Indus but not with the Ganges, indicating that the Indo-Europeans entered India from the northwest. In general, we may be fairly sure that the only regions in which it is reasonable to seek the original home of the Indo-European family are the mainland of Europe and the western part of Asia.Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century it was customary to assume an Asiatic home for the family. Such an opinion was the natural result of biblical tradition that placed the Garden of Eden in the neighborhood of Mesopotamia. This notion seemed to find confirmation in the discovery that Sanskrit, situated in Asia, not only was an Indo-European language but was also in many ways closest in form to the parent speech.

Finally, Europe had seen the invasion of the Hun and the Turk and other Asiatic peoples, and it seemed natural to think of the movements of population as generally westward. But it was eventually recognized that such considerations formed a very slender basis for valid conclusions. It was observed that by far the larger part of the languages of this family have been in Europe from the earliest times to which our knowledge extends. Was it not more natural to suppose that the few representatives of the family in Asia should have made their way eastward than that nearly all the languages of Europe should have been the result of Asiatic incursions? In the course of the nineteenth century the comparative study of the Indo-European languages brought to light a number of facts that seemed to support such a supposition.

The evidence of language itself furnishes the most satisfactory criterion yet discovered
on which to base a solution of the problem. It is obvious that those elements of the vocabulary which all or a considerable number of the branches of the family have in common must have formed a part of the original word-stock. In fact, a word common to two or three branches of the family, if the branches have not been in such proximity to each other as to suggest mutual influence, is likely to have been in the original language.

Now the Indo-European languages generally have a common word for winter and for snow. It is likely that the original home of the family was in a climate that at certain seasons at least was fairly cold. On the other hand it is not certain that there was a common word for the sea. Instead, some branches of the family, when in the course of their wanderings they came into contact with the sea, had to develop their own words for the new conception. The original community was apparently an inland one, although not necessarily situated at a great distance from the coast. Still more instructive is the evidence of the fauna and flora known to the Indo-European community. As Harold H.Bender, whose Home of the Indo-Europeans is an admirable survey of the problem, puts it, “There are no anciently common Indo-European words for elephant, rhinoceros, camel, lion, tiger, monkey, crocodile, parrot, rice, banyan, bamboo, palm, but there are common words, more or less widely spread over Indo-European territory, for snow and freezing cold, for oak, beech, pine, birch, willow, bear, wolf, otter, beaver, polecat, marten, weasel, deer, rabbit, mouse, horse, ox, sheep, goat, pig, dog, eagle, hawk, owl, jay, wild goose, wild duck, partridge or pheasant, snake, tortoise, crab, ant, bee, etc.”

The force of this list is not in the individual items but in the cumulative effect of the two groups. Two words in it, however, have been the object of special consideration, beech and bee. A word corresponding to English beech is found in a number of Indo-European languages and was undoubtedly part of the parent vocabulary. The common beech (Fagus silvatica Linnaeus) is of relatively limited range: It is practically confined to central Europe and is not native east of Poland and Ukraine.13 The testimony of this word as to the original home of the Indo-European family would be persuasive if we could be sure that in the parent speech the word always designated what we know as the beech tree. But although this is its meaning in Latin and the Germanic languages, the word means “oak” in Greek, “elder” and “elm” in other languages.14 In like manner the familiarity of the Indo-European community with the bee is evident from a common word for honey (Latin mel, Greek English mildew, etc.) and a common word for an intoxicating drink made from honey, called mead in Old English. The honeybee is indigenous over almost all Europe but is not found in those parts of Asia that have ever been considered as possible locations of the Indo-European community. From evidence such as this a European home for the Indo-European family has come to be considered more probable.
One other linguistic consideration that figured prominently in past discussions is worth citing because of its intrinsic interest. The branches of the Indo-European family fall into two well-defined groups according to the modification that certain consonants of the parent speech underwent in each. They are known as the centum and satem groups from the words for hundred in Latin and Avestan, respectively. The centum group includes the Hellenic, Italic, Germanic, and Celtic branches. To the satem group belong Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian. A line running roughly from Scandinavia to Greece separates the two and suggests a line of cleavage from which dispersion eastward and westward might have taken place. Although this division has been cited as supporting a homeland in central Europe—in the general area of the present Baltic states—linguists have been unable to find additional characteristics that would have been associated with such a fundamental split. With increasing knowledge about the classification of dialects and the spread of linguistic change, it has become more plausible to view the centum-satum division as the result of a sound change in the eastern section of the Indo-European speech community that spread through Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Slavic, and into Baltic.15 It is still useful to speak of centum and satem languages, but the classification itself does not permit deductions about early migrations.

From the nature of the case, the original home of the Indo-European languages is still a matter of much uncertainty, and many divergent views are held by scholars. During the past thirty years impressive new discoveries have come from archaeological excavations in Russia and Ukraine. Graves in the steppe area between the River Don and the Urals have yielded evidence of an Indo-European “Kurgan” culture that existed north of the Caspian Sea from the fifth through the third millennia B.C. It is especially interesting to note the characteristic flora and fauna of the area during that period, as described by Marija Gimbutas: “The Kurgan people lived in the steppe and forest-steppe zone, but in the fifth and fourth millennia the climate was warmer and damper than at present and what is now the steppe zone was more forested. Mixed forests, including oak, birch, fir, beech, elder, elm, ash, aspen, apple, cherry and willow, extended along rivers and rivulets in which such forest animals as aurochs, elk, boar, wild horse, wolf, fox, beaver, squirrel, badger, hare, and roe deer were present.” Gimbutas, who first proposed the name of the culture, believes that the Kurgan people were the original Indo-Europeans, an opinion shared by many archaeologists and linguists. Some scholars accept the descriptions by American and Soviet archaeologists of the early periods of Kurgan culture but propose different directions of migration. Although the Indo-European homeland may prove impossible to locate precisely, one can expect new evidence and new interpretations of old evidence from both linguistics and archaeology.

At present it is sufficient to observe that most of the proposed locations can be accommodated in the district east of the Germanic area stretching from central Europe to the steppes of southern Russia. The civilization that had been attained by the people of this community at the time of their dispersal was approximately that known as neolithic. Copper was, however, already in use to a limited extent. The Indo-Europeans were no longer purely nomadic but had settled homes with houses and some agriculture. Here the evidence drawn from the vocabulary must be used with caution. We must be careful not to attribute to words their modern significance. The existence of a word for plow does not necessarily indicate anything more than the most primitive kind of implement. The Indo-Europeans raised grain and wool and had learned to spin and weave. They kept cattle and had for food not only the products of their own labor but such fruit and game as have always served the needs of primitive communities. They recognized the existence of a soul, believed in gods, and had developed certain ethical ideas. Without assuming complete uniformity of achievement throughout the area covered by this linguistic group, we may believe that the cultural development attained by the Indo-European was already considerable.