Proto-Indo-Europeans
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the prehistoric people of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to linguistic reconstruction.
Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BC. Mainstream scholarship places them in the forest-steppe zone immediately to the north of the western end of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe. Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 BC) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to 5500 BC), and suggest alternative location hypotheses.
By the early second millennium BC, offshoots of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached far and wide across Eurasia, including Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (the ancestors of Mycenaean Greece), the north of Europe (Corded Ware culture), the edges of Central Asia (Yamnaya culture), and southern Siberia (Afanasievo culture).
See also
- Archaeogenetics
- Indo-Aryan migration
- Comparative linguistics
- Historical linguistics
- Paleolithic Continuity Theory
- Old European culture
- Proto-Indo-European language
- Proto-Indo-European religion
- Proto-Indo-European society
- Haplogroup I (Y-DNA)
- Origin of the Romanians#Paleogenetics
- Gravettian
