Since the 1940s the argument in favor of northern Europe as the PIE homeland
has rested largely on its river names, which Hans Krahe concluded were Indo-
European.^44 Wolfgang Schmid, extending the argument, proposed that PIE was
spoken north of the Pripet marshes in Belarus, and that from this area Indo-
European river names were brought into northern and central Europe and
especially to the Baltic.^45 There is reason to believe, as will be detailed toward
the end of this chapter, that by the middle of the third millennium BCmany people
in northeastern Europe were speaking an Indo-European language. But we shall
also see, thanks to recent DNA studies, that these languages would have been
intrusive rather than indigenous, having been brought into northeastern Europe
by pastoralists from the east. These pastoralists were apparently the first food-
producers to live along the Baltic, and it is possible that the river names in
northeastern Europe were indeed conferred by Indo-European speakers. The
language they would have been speaking, however, was not PIE but a slightly
later stage of the language: Proto-Baltic. Instead of supposing that PIE was
indigenous to northern Europe, we must say that in the third millennium BCan
early descendant of PIE seems to have been brought into northeastern Europe.
The PIE homeland, several centuries earlier, had apparently lain somewhere other
than in Baltic Eurasia.
Leaving northern Europe, let us look at places more likely to have occasioned
a clean separation of Neolithic colonies from an Indo-Hittite matrix. Almost
inevitably we are led to suppose that the Black Sea was a factor in this separation.
An important unknown here is the “Black Sea Flood,” which oceanographers
William Ryan and Walter Pitman believed was a cataclysmic event ca. 5600 BC.
As concluded by Ryan and Pitman, the Bosporus was broken through at that time
and the waters of the Mediterranean poured northward, in several months doubling
the extent of the Black Sea and bringing it more or less to its present shape and
size.^46 If such a flood did occur it would have inundated whatever Neolithic
settlements were standing near the shores of the “old” Black Sea and would have
provided the necessary separation of Indo-Hittite colonies from their mother
country, but many geologists and oceanographers have disputed Ryan and
Pitman’s conclusions.^47 Some of the critics accept the occurrence of a flood but
believe it was not nearly so catastrophic as Ryan and Pitman contended that it
was, and other critics have argued that the supposed flood did not occur at all.
“Black Sea Flood” or not, the Black Sea coast of Anatolia must be ruled out
as the place where PIE evolved. In sharp contrast to southern and western Anatolia,
where so many Neolithic settlements have been found, northern Anatolia is a blank.
Roger Matthews noted the copious information about the Anatolian Neolithic that
has come from the Konya plain and elsewhere in the south and west. “If on a map
we draw a line across Anatolia from Istanbul to Malatya, however, we see that
to the north of that line there is still no convincing evidence for a definite Neolithic
presence in Anatolia.”^48 Although this may in part be a result of the fact that
northern Anatolia is, in Matthews’ word, “understudied” by archaeologists, it is
also a result of ancient demographic patterns. Matthews and his colleagues spent
5 years on “Project Paphlagonia,” funded by the British Institute at Ankara. The
12 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European