The Pontic–Caspian steppe

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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.