the Baltic subgroup of Indo-European, with some very archaic features not far
removed from PIE, is represented only by the Latvian and Lithuanian languages
and was for that reason labeled “Baltic” by nineteenth-century philologists. Once
upon a time, however, “Baltic” languages were apparently spoken over a much
larger part of Eurasia. Because the oldest documents in any Baltic language are
the catechisms written in Lithuanian and Old Prussian (now extinct) during the
Lutheran Reformation, evidence for the extent of Baltic in ancient times comes
mostly from river names. Mallory noted the presence of Baltic river names
somewhat to the west and far to the east and the south of Latvia and Lithuania,
and he reasonably assumed that various Baltic languages had been spoken there
until they were submerged by the expansion of Germanic and Slavic languages
in the first millennium CE. According to Mallory, “the minimal view would see
the Balts, during the first millennium BC, occupying the area from west of the
Vistula’s mouth east to Moscow and the upper Volga (which itself carries a Baltic
name), and south almost as far as Kiev.”^84 Because “Baltic” names are attached
to rivers more than 600 miles from the Baltic, Wolfgang Schmid argued that the
PIE homeland was near the Baltic, and that migrations from that homeland spread
the Indo-European languages through much of Europe and Asia.^85
Recent DNA analyses indicate that demic diffusion tended to go in the other
direction: in the third millennium BCmany people from the east moved westward
to the Baltic and beyond.^86 Population geneticists have found that although
people living in northern Europe in the fourth millennium BChad little or no
DNA indicating what the geneticists call a “Yamna” (or “Yamnaya”) ancestry,^87
throughout the third millennium BCnorthern Europe experienced a considerable
influx of people from the “Yamna” cultures of the east. More specifically, the
geneticists concluded that the population of the Corded Ware culture of northern
Europe (and to a lesser extent of the Bell Beaker culture) was in large part
descended from ancestors who came from the Corded Ware culture further east.
The Corded Ware culture, which lasted through almost all of the third millen -
nium BC, is an archaeological assemblage that stretched from the upper Volga to
the Rhine. It is known mostly from graves, and although considerable evidence
for settlements has been found the settlements were apparently small and of
relatively short duration. Domesticated animals were important in the Corded Ware
culture, and many of the people may have been mobile pastoralists. It is not at all
unlikely that over the centuries a drift from the Yamna culture headed northward
and westward and helped to form the Corded Ware culture. North eastern Europe—
from the Baltic to the Rhine—was in several respects more attractive than the lands
that lay to the east in the same latitude. Agriculture and animal husbandry were
far better established in the west: the Corded Ware culture was essentially the first
culture east of the Baltic to depend on domesticated animals rather than on
hunting,^88 while the Neolithic had come to northern Europe 2000 years earlier.
Winters in northern Europe were not so cold as those in Russia. Also important
was that proximity to the Baltic and the Kattegat extension of the North Sea meant
access to amber, which was highly prized throughout the Corded Ware culture
and also in the Yamna culture.
20 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European