Evidently it was along the shores of the Baltic and the Kattegat seas that an influx
from the southeast especially changed the population’s DNA. One of the geneti -
cists’ studies shows that in modern Europe the highest percentage of Yamna ancestry
is found in Norway, Lithuania and Estonia (with Iceland and Scotland close
behind).^89 Even along the Baltic, however, the influx must have been gradual since
here, according to a recent archaeological report on the region’s Corded Ware
culture, “no mass migrations have been observed.”^90 What language or languages
the immigrants were speaking on their arrival in northern Europe cannot of course
be determined, but it is very likely that those who came from the southeast did speak
an Indo-European language. The geneticists’ findings therefore add some support,
however shaky, to the possibility that in the third millennium BCthe considerable
area in which Proto-Baltic was spoken expanded into northeastern Europe.
Another area into which an Indo-European language seems to have expanded
in the third millennium BCwas southern Caucasia. Archaeological evidence is
clear that after 2500 BCnomadic pastoralism became prevalent here. Eventually
most of the Kura-Araxes settlements were abandoned, and those that remained
through the Trialeti culture were relatively small.^91 If PIE did not evolve in the
Kura-Araxes culture, and we have good reason to think that it did not, it may have
been with the arrival of nomadism in the third quarter of the third millennium
BCthat an Indo-European language first came to south Caucasia. Where the
pastoralists may have come from, or whether most of them were simply Kura-
Araxes villagers who had become pastoralists, is unclear. Those pastoralists who
did not have local roots may have come from north of the Caucasus, but it is also
possible that they came from the southeast. Some specialists have argued, that is,
that pastoralists from northwestern Iran began filtering into southern Caucasia in
the third millennium BC.^92 We know only that in the middle of the second
millennium BCIndo-Iranian was spoken in or near to southern Caucasia.
Most of this is very uncertain and unclear, but frames my suspicion—shared
by many who know more about the topic than I do—that by the end of the third
millennium BCseveral Indo-European languages were spoken over a very wide
area, including much of the grassland steppe and the forest steppe far to the east
of the Volga, the Corded Ware culture westward from the upper Volga into
northeastern Europe, and probably also southern Caucasia. Informing the
speculative is the certain and the near-certain. PIE was descended from Proto-
Indo-Hittite, the indigenous language of western and southern Anatolia. Early in
the seventh millennium BCpeople on Anatolia’s western coast were fully engaged
in the production of food, harvesting crops and depending on domestic animals
for their meat. A growth of population followed the production of food and
encouraged the colonizing of arable lands outside of western Anatolia. Among
the first lands to be colonized were central Crete, Thessaly and the southern
Balkans, from all of which the colonists remained in communication with the Proto-
Indo-Hittite heartland. PIE must have evolved because Indo-Hittite colonists
sailed—still on log boats or some other primitive craft—to a land farther away.
The most likely locations for such a distant colonizing are lands along the
northeastern shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. And the most likely
Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European 21