modern population defined by language. If our language is a descendant of theirs, that does not make
them ‘our ancestors’, any more than the ancient Romans are the ancestors of the French, the
Romanians, and the Brazilians. The Indo-Europeans were a people in the sense of a linguistic
community. We should probably think of them as a loose network of clans and tribes, inhabiting a
coherent territory of limited size."[3]
While 'Proto-Indo-Europeans' is used in scholarship to designate the group of speakers associated with
the reconstructed proto-language and culture, the term 'Indo-Europeans' may refer to any historical
people that speak an Indo-European language.[4]
Culture
Further information: Proto-Indo-European religion and Proto-Indo-European society
Using linguistic reconstruction from old Indo-European languages such as Latin and Sanskrit,
hypothetical features of the Proto-Indo-European language are deduced. Assuming that these linguistic
features reflect culture and environment of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the following cultural and
environmental traits are widely proposed:
pastoralism, including domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs[5]
agriculture and cereal cultivation, including technology commonly ascribed to late-Neolithic
farming communities, e.g., the plow[6] transportation by or across water[5]
the solid wheel,[7][5] used for wagons, but not yet chariots with spoked wheels[8] worship of a sky god,[6] *Dyḗus Ph 2 tḗr (lit. "sky father"; > Vedic Sanskrit Dyáuṣ Pitṛ , ́ Ancient
Greek Ζεύς (πατήρ) / Zeus (dyeus) ), vocative *dyeu ph 2 ter (> Latin Iūpiter , Illyrian Deipaturos )[note
1][9] oral heroic poetry or song lyrics that used stock phrases such as imperishable fame ( *ḱléwos
ń̥dʰgʷʰitom )[10] and the wheel of the sun ( *sh₂uens kʷekʷlos ).[11] a patrilineal kinship-system based on relationships between men[note 2]A 2016 phylogenetic analysis of Indo-European folktales found that one tale, The Smith and the Devil ,
could be confidently reconstructed to the Proto-Indo-European period. This story, found in
contemporary Indo-European folktales from Scandinavia to India, describes a blacksmith who offers his
soul to a malevolent being (commonly a devil in modern versions of the tale) in exchange for the ability
to weld any kind of materials together. The blacksmith then uses his new ability to stick the devil to an
immovable object (often a tree), thus avoiding his end of the bargain. According to the authors, the
reconstruction of this folktale to PIE implies that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had metallurgy, which in
turn "suggests a plausible context for the cultural evolution of a tale about a cunning smith who attains
a superhuman level of mastery over his craft."[12]
History of research
Researchers have made many attempts to identify particular prehistoric cultures with the Proto-Indo-
European-speaking peoples, but all such theories remain speculative.