location for the evolution of PIE is northern Caucasia and the steppe along the
Don and the middle Volga, as settlers speaking their Indo-Hittite language came
into close and continuing contact with the native Mesolithic population.
After the maturation of PIE, late in the fourth millennium BC, it soon spread
(thanks in large part to wheeled vehicles) through and well beyond the grassland
steppe. As it spread, PIE must have evolved into several regional dialects and then—
surely by the end of the third millennium BC—into several distinct languages. We
have no reason to think, however, that at that time Indo-European languages were
yet being spoken in most of Europe (in Greece and Italy, we can be quite certain,
they were not), or that several important Indo-European subgroups—Keltic and
Germanic, as well as Greek and Italic—had yet begun to form.
Notes
1 For a thorough review of the linguistic evidence for wheeled vehicles in Proto-Indo-
European society see Meid 1994, pp. 57–64. For the most recent reviews see Pereltsvaig
and Lewis 2015, pp. 171–174, and Anthony and Ringe 2015, pp. 201–206.
2 Fortson 2004, p. 39.
3 For Sturtevant’s “Indo-Hittite Hypothesis,” a lecture presented in 1938, see Sturtevant
1962.
4 Sturtevant 1962, p. 108.
5 Puhvel 1994, p. 252.
6 Melchert 1994, p. 3.
7 Melchert 2001, p. 233.
8 Lehrman 2001, p. 107. For his earlier work see Lehrman 1996.
9 For an explanation of the methodology and results of their work see Ringe, Warnow
and Taylor 2002, pp. 59–129. At p. 97, in their search for the root node of the Indo-
European tree, the authors conclude that “the root node must fall between Anatolian
and the rest of the tree,” and that by far the most probable of the possible conclusions
from their study is that “Anatolian is one first-order subgroup of the family, and all
the other languages together constitute the other first-order subgroups.” The cladistics
approach was subsequently extended by factoring in the effects of “network evolution,”
but the original conclusions remain. For the research on subfamily networks see
Nakhleh, Ringe and Warnow 2005.
10 For some caveats see Richard Alderson’s remarks at Drews 2001a, pp. 76–77.
11 See Sturtevant 1962, p. 106: “The Hittite verb of some thirty-five centuries ago was
as different from the Sanskrit or the ancient Greek verb as the French or the English
verb is today.”
12 See Dickinson 1999b, p. 97:
I feel rather strongly that students of the Indo-European languages should have paid
greater attention than they mostly have, until now, to the unease that many
archaeologists have been expressing for decades about the constant appeal to theories
of migration as the main vehicle of linguistic spread.13 Renfrew 1987, pp. 123–124.
14 Renfrew 1987, p. 124. Renfrew’s reference is to J. G. D. Clark, “The Invasion Hypo -
thesis in British Prehistory,” Antiquity40 (1966), pp. 172–189.
15 Dickinson 1999, p. 100.
16 Renfrew 1987, pp. 55–56 and 168–174. Had Renfrew made a distinction between the
Anatolian languages and the Indo-European languages his thesis about the place of
origin would probably have met with far less opposition than it has.
22 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European