Those practised in this form of endeavour tend to agree that three large
culture complexes in the third millennium are likely to be relevant to the early
history of the Indo-European dispersal: the Yamna(ya) or Pit-grave culture
which extended from the Danube to the Urals, a Balkan-Danubian complex
in south-east Europe, and the Corded Ware culture extending from the Rhine
across Germany and southern Scandinavia eastwards to the upper Volga. One
adept has written recently:
No one has yet figured out a coherent linguistic history of Europe without assuming
that both the Corded Ware and the Yamnaya cultures were predominantly Indo-
European speaking, and yet there is no general agreement about the relationship
between these cultures.^29
His own model seems entirely plausible. His original Indo-Europeans are
represented by the Sredny Stog and Khvalynsk cultures in the Ukraine and
middle Volga regions. About 4400 , following depopulation in the
Balkans, they spread westward. The division between the Anatolians and
the rest perhaps took place in the lower Dnieper region in the first half of the
fourth millennium, before the invention or general currency of the wheel, as
the Anatolian word for a wheel is not from the same root as that current in
other branches of Indo-European.^30 The Anatolian party might be repre-
sented by the Usatovo and other hybrid cultures found west of the Black
Sea down to 3500; this area had close ties across the Bosporos. In the third
millennium what later appears as the Luwian area shows a sequence of
destruction and depopulation, followed by a switch to a more pastoral econ-
omy: this would be the work of the incoming Indo-European groups. The
MIE peoples would be represented by the Yamna and Corded Ware cultures
together. Evidence is cited for population movements from the steppe into
north and central Europe between about 3500 and 3200.^31
This scenario implies a higher (but not much higher) chronology than the
termini ante quos proposed above. In placing the last phase of Indo-European
unity no earlier than the late fifth to early fourth millennium, it is in accord
with arguments drawn from the Indo-Europeans’ apparent familiarity with
the domesticated horse, ox traction, and the woolly sheep.^32 It also suggests
an incipient division between east and west Indo-European in the late fourth
millennium. The eastern variety would be ancestral to Graeco-Aryan.
(^29) B. J. Darden in Drews (2001), 212.
(^30) The earliest evidence for wheeled vehicles is from Poland and dated to 3530–3310. See
D. W. Anthony, JIES 19 (1991), 199 f.; K. Jones-Bley, JIES 28 (2000), 445; Darden in Drews
(2001), 204–9. On the vocabulary see EIEC 640 f.
(^31) Darden, ibid. 184–228.
(^32) Cf. EIEC 157, 276, 648 f.; E. W. Barber in Drews (2001), 6, 13; Darden, ibid. 193–200, 204.
Introduction 11