Anatolia

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The peninsula between the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Mediterranean, occupied today by most of Türkiye, and a region that enters this Journey twice for unconnected reasons. It is where Hittite was written and recovered, which makes it the source of the single most important body of evidence for the shape of Proto-Indo-European. It is also the homeland proposed by the rival hypothesis about where Indo-European began: the argument, associated with Colin Renfrew and given quantitative form by Bayesian phylogenies published in 2003 and 2012, is that the family spread with the expansion of farming out of Anatolia in the seventh millennium BCE rather than with pastoralists from the steppe four thousand years later. The two roles are logically independent, and confusing them is a common error — Anatolia can be the location of the earliest attested branch without being the homeland of the family, and an early-branching Anatolian is compatible with either account. Anatolia is also one of the world's deepest archaeological sequences, with early agricultural settlement attested from the ninth millennium BCE onward.