The Pontic–Caspian steppe

Assembled from 13 blocks · 2 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. The belt of grassland north of the Black Sea and the Caspian, running roughly from the lower Danube across southern Ukraine and southern Russia towards the Volga and the Urals, and the homeland assigned to Proto-Indo-European by the majority hypothesis. The case is cumulative rather than singular. The reconstructed vocabulary of the proto-language includes securely established terms for wheeled transport and for wool and dairying, which fit a fourth-millennium pastoral economy rather than an earlier farming one; the steppe was where horse domestication and wheeled vehicles converged into a mobile way of life; the region lies adjacent to the Uralic-speaking zone from which loanword strata indicate contact; and the distribution of the family's branches radiates outward in a pattern consistent with dispersal from it. From 2015 the ancient-genomics evidence added a demographic component the linguistics could not supply, showing a large movement of steppe-associated ancestry into central Europe in the third millennium BCE. The region is a grassland corridor, not a bounded territory, and any homeland placed in it is an area of the order of a thousand kilometres across.
3. Knowledge
4. The Pontic–Caspian steppe
5. Connections
6. Ancient DNA as a check on linguistic prehistory
7. Proto-Indo-European
8. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
9. Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
10. A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
11. Evidence
12. Supports the steppe hypothesis as argued from reconstructed wheeled-vehicle and wool vocabulary, the archaeology of the Pontic–Caspian region, and the Indo-Iranian loanword strata in Uralic. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No page is cited and no reconstructed form is quoted from the book; the date of horse domestication, which the book discusses and which has been revised since, is deliberately not stated anywhere in this pack.
13. Supports the finding of a large third-millennium-BCE influx of steppe-associated ancestry into central Europe. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No percentage of ancestry replacement is quoted anywhere in this pack, because the regional figures could not be checked; a companion 2015 study reporting compatible results is not separately cited for the same reason.