North European hypothesis
Main article: North European hypothesis
"Expansion of the Pre-Teutonic
Nordics" — map from The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant,
showing hypothesized migrations of Nordic peoples
In the meantime, the idea that Indo-European languages had originated
from South Asia gradually lost support among academics. After the end
of the 1860s, alternative models of Indo-European migrations began to
emerge, some of them locating the ancestral homeland in Northern
Europe.[103][110] Karl Penka, credited as "a transitional figure between
Aryanism and Nordicism",[111] argued in 1883 that the Aryans originated
in southern Scandinavia.[103][ need quotation to verify ] In the early-20th century,
German scholar Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), attempting to connect a
prehistoric material culture with the reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European language, contended on archaeological grounds that the
'Indo-Germanic' ( Indogermanische ) migrations originated from a
homeland located in northern Europe.[12] Until the end of World War II,
scholarship on the Indo-European Urheimat broadly fell into two
camps: Kossinna's followers and those, initially led by Otto
Schrader (1855-1919), who supported a steppe homeland in Eurasia,
which became the most widespread hypothesis among scholars.[100]