collapse of Old Europe.[2] Hereafter the Maykop culture suddenly arose,
Tripillia towns grew strongly, and eastern steppe people migrated to
the Altai mountains, founding the Afanasevo culture (3,300 to 2,500
BCE).[2]
Vocabulary
The core element of the steppe hypothesis is the identification of the
proto-Indo-European culture as a nomadic pastoralist society that did
not practice intensive agriculture. This identification rests on the fact
that vocabulary related to cows, to horses and horsemanship, and to
wheeled vehicles can be reconstructed for all branches of the family,
whereas only a few agricultural vocabulary items are reconstructable,
suggesting a gradual adoption of agriculture through contact with non-
Indo-Europeans. If this evidence and reasoning is accepted, the search
for the Indo-European proto-culture has to involve searching for the
earliest introduction of domesticated horses and wagons into Europe.[4]
Responding to these arguments, proponents of the Anatolian
hypothesis Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson have argued that the
different branches could have independently developed similar
vocabulary based on the same roots, creating the false appearance of
shared inheritance – or alternatively, that the words related to wheeled
vehicle might have been borrowed across Europe at a later date.
Proponents of the Steppe hypothesis have argued this to be highly
unlikely, and to break with the established principles for reasonable
assumptions when explaining linguistic comparative data.[4]
Another source of evidence for the steppe hypothesis is the presence of
what appears to be many shared loanwords between Uralic
languages and proto-Indo-European, suggesting that these languages
were spoken in adjacent areas. This would have had to take place a
good deal further north than the Anatolian or Near Eastern scenarios