European origins. Its main proponents are Marcel Otte, Alexander
Häusler,[2] and Mario Alinei.
The PCT or PCP posits that the advent of Indo-European languages
should be linked to the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe and western
Asia from Africa in the Upper Paleolithic.[107] Employing "lexical
periodization", Alinei arrives at a timeline deeper than even that
of Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis.[107][note 18]
Since 2004, an informal workgroup of scholars who support the
Paleolithic continuity hypothesis has been held online.[108] Apart from
Alinei himself, its leading members (referred to as "Scientific
Committee" in the website) are linguists Xaverio Ballester (University of
Valencia) and Francesco Benozzo (University of Bologna). Also included
are prehistorian Marcel Otte (Université de Liège) and
anthropologist Henry Harpending (University of Utah).[107]
It was not listed by Mallory in 1997 among the proposals for the origins
of the Indo-European languages that are widely discussed and
considered credible within academia.[109]
Fringe theories
Hyperborea
Main article: Hyperborea
Soviet Indologist Natalia R. Guseva[110] and Soviet ethnographer S. V.
Zharnikova,[111] influenced by Bal Gangadhar Tilak's 1903 work The
Arctic Home in the Vedas , argued for a northern Urals Arctic homeland
of the Indo-Aryan and Slavic people;[112] their ideas were popularized by
Russian nationalists.[113]