Black Sea, associated with Corded Ware culture, spread from the east.
Northern Europeans (especially Norwegians, Lithuanians, and
Estonians) get nearly half their ancestry from this group; Spanish and
Italians about a quarter, and Sardinians almost none. It is thought that
this influx of pastoralists brought the Indo-European languages with
them. Steppe ancestry is also found in the DNA of speakers of Indo-
European languages in India, especially in the Y chromosome, which is
inherited in the male line.[26]
In general, the prestige associated with a specific language or dialect
and its progressive dominance over others can be explained by the
access to a natural resource unknown or unexploited until then by its
speakers, which is thought to be horse-based pastoralism for Indo-
European speakers rather than crop cultivation.[note 3][27][17]
A notable third possibility, which has gained renewed attention since
the 2010s, is the "Near Eastern model",[23] also known as the Armenian
hypothesis. It was proposed by linguists Tamaz V.
Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the early 1980s, postulating
connections between Indo-European and Caucasian languages based
on the disputed glottalic theory and connected to archaeological
findings by Grogoriev.[23] Some recent DNA-research has led to
renewed suggestions of the possibility of a Caucasian or northwest
Iranian homeland for archaic or 'proto-proto-Indo-European' (also
called 'Indo-Anatolian' or 'Indo-Hittite' in the literature),[28][note 4] the
common ancestor of both Anatolian languages and early proto-IE (from
which Tocharian and all other early branches split-off).[5][10][29][30][13][note
5] These suggestions are disputed in other recent publications, which
still locate the origin of the ancestor of proto-Indo-European in the
Eastern European/Eurasian steppe[31][32][33] or from a hybridization of
both steppe and Northwest-Caucasian languages,[33][note 6][note 7] while
"[a]mong comparative linguists, a Balkan route for the introduction of