gain support until Renfrew's Anatolian theory revived aspects of their
proposal.[4]
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov proposed that the Greeks moved west across
Anatolia to their present location, a northward movement of some IE
speakers that brought them into contact with the Finno-Ugric
languages, and suggested that the Kurgan area, or better "Black Sea
and Volga steppe", was a secondary homeland from which the western
IE languages emerged.[75]
South Caucasus/Iranian suggestions
Recent DNA research which shows that the steppe-people derived from
a mix of Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) and Caucasus Hunter-
Gatherers,[note 10] has led to renewed suggestions of the possibility of a
Caucasian, or even Iranian, homeland for an archaic proto-Indo-
European, the common ancestor of both Anatolian languages and all
other Indo-European languages.[77][note 4] It is argued that this may lend
support to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, according to which both proto-
Anatolian and proto-Indo-European split-off from a common mother
language "no later than the 4th millennium BCE."[22][9][78][79][80][13][81][note
5]
Damgaard et al. found that sampled Copper Age and Bronze Age
Anatolians all carried similar levels of CHG ancestry, but no EHG
ancestry. They conclude that Early and Middle Bronze Age Anatolia did
not receive ancestry from steppe populations, indicating that Indo-
European language spread into Anatolia was not associated with large
migrations from the steppe. The authors assert that their data is
consistent with a scenario in which Indo-European languages were
introduced to Anatolia in association with CHG admixture before c.
3,700 BCE, in contrast to the standard steppe model, and despite the
association of CHG ancestry with several non-Indo-European languages.