Introductionvarious Indo-European languages are supposed to have come.
It is unlikely that a single and undifferentiated language pre-
vailed throughout this homeland, but it is quite unclear
whether the differentiation was merely a matter of dialects—
that is, mutually intelligible forms of the same language—or
whether it was a matter of more-or-less distinct languages (a
division, for instance, along the so-called centum and satem
lines). At any rate, this essay will use the term "Proto-Indo-
European" in the broader sense, standing for the hypothetical
language or languages spoken in the hypothetical Indo-Euro-
pean homeland, on the eve of the hypothetical Indo-European
dispersal. The people who spoke the language(s) of the home-
land will here be called Proto-Indo-European speakers, a cum-
bersome term that may be shortened to the slightly outlandish
"PIE speakers." The PIE speakers are the linguistic ancestors of
every person able to read this book. Whether any of one's phys-
ical ancestors was a PIE speaker is another question altogether.
A century ago, scholars generally employed a rather differ-
ent set of terms and concepts. Most historians and philologists
then believed that language was ideally (although not always
in practice) a manifestation of nationality or race. They there-
fore assumed that there had once been an Indo-European race,
and that in some parts of contemporary Eurasia "Indo-Euro-
peans" or "Aryans" were still to be found (although who they
were, and how they were to be identified, was controversial).
When summarizing early scholarship I have therefore retained
the terms—"Indo-Europeans" or "Aryans"—then current.
This essay is an attempt to answer several sets of questions
at the same time. These sets seem to be interrelated, perhaps
even interlocked, and it is for that reason that a generalist
might be able to make a contribution in fields where specialists
must have the final word. Few of the specific points made here
are original. On almost every topic touched upon in this book,
new evidence and new analyses have recently appeared, and I
hope that I have given ample credit to those scholars whose
work with the primary evidence is responsible for the new
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