ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the origins of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) in the fourth millennium BC and its remarkable spread during the third. An advance in the study of the origins of PIE and the subsequent expansion of Indo-European languages is the gradual fading of belief in folk migrations. The Anatolian languages are archaic, reflecting an evolutionary stage considerably prior to the stage reached in PIE. A northern European homeland for PIE can hardly be squared with the Indo-Hittite theory, and with the near-certainty that western Anatolia was the original locus of Proto-Indo-Hittite. It is likely that PIE was also spoken along the middle Volga, the Don and the smaller rivers flowing into the Sea of Azov, but the Maikop culture may have been an especially important part of the PIE homeland. Along the middle Volga the Khvalynsk archaeological culture began ca. 5000 BC, and it continued all through the fifth millennium BC.
