Did the Indo-Europeans Really Even Exist?
When ancient archaeology and modern politics clash
Well, yes, more or less. But as with all things archaeological, it’s complicated, and the meddling of modern political motives doesn’t help.
The idea of the Indo-Europeans originated in linguistics, around the end of the 18th century, when the wide and undeniable links between Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Iranian, Sanskritic and several smaller language families were recognized. This led to the assertion that these languages must’ve all evolved from the same source, labeled “Proto-Indo-European”, thought to have been spoken anywhere around 4500–2500 BC. So far, so good.
The complications start in what’s called the “Kurgan hypothesis”, which postulates that the gigantic geographic spread of the Indo-European languages can all be traced back to a single origin point, where Proto-Indo-European was first spoken. This origin is identified in the archaeological cultures famed for kurgan (burial mound) use, somewhere in eastern Ukraine or southern Russia, and specifically in the scarce material remains of the archaeological Yamnaya culture of that area, which flourished around 3300–2600 BC. The identification with the Yamnaya specifically and the area in general come from a variety of factors, including genetic analysis of human remains and…
