Proto–Indo-European Homeland and Other Urheimats

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Most linguists speculate that Proto–Indo-European (PIE) was spoken somewhere in the Eurasian Steppe, but that is a very large part of the world. The Kurgan Hypothesis, for example, places the PIE Urheimat in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (roughly, Ukraine). Linguists use things like comparison with archeology and history, lexical analysis (if most descendent languages have cognate words relating to desert life, the Urheimat was probably in a desert), and statistical analysis of the rate of change/mutation. Another possible marker is the weighting of diversity in a language family.

One complicating factor is that languages don't evolve linearly through time, branching in neat halves every few hundred years. Languages form pidgins and creoles, dialect chains, Sprachbunds, etc.; there is often significant lexical exchange before languages finally split and lose mutual intelligibility, and of course there can still be crossover even after that and sometimes long after. Languages are not like animals reproducing through sexual reproduction and forming distinct (more or less) species. I can, for example, insert words from Mandarin Chinese (assuming I knew it) into my use of English, and if they were to pick up, there's cross-pollination. Also, the mutation is eventually so great that no method can recover a more ancient common ancestor; thus, for now we are stuck with apparently unrelated language families (excepting a few highly controversial theories) like Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, and Afro-Asiatic. Some speculate that even Homo heidelbergensis may have had the rudiments of language, which would push things far beyond what linguists could ever hope to recover. Even assuming all living Homo sapiens are descended from a very small bottleneck population, that would still be too far back (69,000-77,000 years ago) for linguists to recover any semblance of their language.

Back to Afro-Asiatic, I'm most partial to the theory that its Urheimat is in the Horn of Africa, and I'd be more skeptical of any theory that puts it in the Arabian Peninsula or the Levant. At the time, the Sahara was probably not yet fully desert.

I am nowhere near the level of expertise in the history of the development of Proto-Indo-European that you are, but it is well-documented that the actual Indo-European language family did develop over an area roughly covering the edges of what is now the Volga/Dneiper rivers to the edges of Western China.
You probably already know this. However, all those languages are interconnected, and there is always the "Indo-" side where there was a direct influence from the Indian Peninsula, Iran (what is now Iran), and the Levant.
My question - have you ever heard of the Tarim Basin mummies and Tocharian? It is proposed that these mummies spoke Tocharian, and Tocharian is an Indo-European language that is thought to be most closely connected to both the Celtic and Hittite tongues. Now, that would be interesting, because of the obvious distance problem. But the very grammatical roots of the language have bases in both languages. And while both the Celtic dialects as well as Hittite are Indo-European, the Hittites could possibly serve as a geographical/linguistic branch from Europe into the "Middle" East.
It seems, however, to solidify archaeologists' and anthropologists', as well as linguists' estimates that Indo-European did have a beginning in the Ukrainian steppes. Even the skull measurements (I know, not always an exact science, but with this stuff, quite useful) of the entire Eurasian steppes all trace back to a rough pool of common measurements with older skulls in the Pontic-Caspian Steppes.

As far as Afro-Asiatic, it makes sense that it would originate more in the Sahara, and there is evidence that all of the Horn of Africa, up to Egypt and the Levant, was not desert thousands of years ago, but well watered forested terrain.

The way I have learned of language evolution patterning human evolution/migration is that language is like a ladder - with each evolvement and mutation, you add another rung, which can stretch across continents and twist upon itself in many different ways, and the rungs follow random sequences for which there is no discernible pattern, simply because human behavior is not predictable. However, I don't think that those language families are unrelated. I simply believe we haven't learned/discovered enough yet. I mean, Tocharian did add a whole new branch to Indo-European that might have originated further south with an Afro-Asiatic element, as I said earlier.

Do I make any sense at all?

I don't know much about the topic, but it seems likely to me that all languages do have a common ancestor, even if there are no obvious remaining traces of the links between some language families. After all, one would assume that language developed before humans spread far and wide, and one would assume that the language in this small community reached a sort of consensus.

A subject that has long fascinated me is human origins and conneections- and how languages are clues ( and sometimes a misleading red herring) to those migrations.

Its possible that the transtion to true spoken language was made in a short period of time by one small tribe of anatomically modern people in Africa as recently as 150K years ago and that that gave them an edge. And they fanned out across the globe. So both their genes and their ability to speak are our common legacy. So all modern languages probably do have a single common ancestor.
But languages morph at such a rate that it would be virtually impossible to reconstruct this one ancestreal language from modern languages. Beyond five thousand years inherited similarities between languages become impossible to distinquish from chance similarities. So this first language would have throroughly changed thirty times over leaving no trace in modern languages of today.

The first great split in language communities may have been that between the ancestors of the speakers of Khoisan, and the ancestors of everyone else on the planet. The Khoisan are the Bushman of South Africa. They use clicks and pops and other odd sound effects in their speech that no other groups in africa (nor anywhere else) use. My theory is that that "tsk tsk tsk" sound that we English spearkers use may be the last remnant to survive in English of our common linguistic heritage with the Khoisan Bushmen.

Dont know much about the AfroAsian family except that it includes both the semetic and the Hamitic languages.

For Indoeuropean the scholars have been in a back and forth battle between locating its homeland north of Black Sea (the pontic region of southern Ukraine and southern russia) on one hand- and putting the homeland south of the Black Sea in Turkey. Over the years one idea gets favored, then the other. Turkey vs Pontic Region.

More than a georgraphic dispute- the southern idea goes with the notion of that the indoeuropeans were sedentary farmers who spread slowly and started to spread early. The north shore origin implies that they were highly mobile warlike seminomadic raiders who conquered the sedentary peoples at a later and more rapid rate. Two very different scenarios.

Recent TV documentaries seem to combine both ideas: they have the PIE people originating in Turkey- moving east into Iran. Then some go south to invade India while others go north into central asia.
Then the ones pushing into central asia continue to move north but then make a left turn around the Caspian sea- and THEN invade the pontic region - and then fan out westward across all of europe.

But back in central asia a few also went east into north east china and became the Tocharians.

Who knows?

But my guess is that the fact that there is this curious linguistic uniformity that stretches across a large piece of the globe- the northern two thirds of the Indian subcontinent, Iran ( at one time Turkey) and virtually all of Europe means that something big happened at some point several thousand years ago that caused a relatively small group of people to leave a very large linguistic footprint.

My guess is this: its all about cows.

About five thousand years ago a tribe of 500 people in central asia had accidently hit two tipping points. They (the people themselves) had reached a high proportion of people who had the wierd mutation that enabled them to still digest milk as adults. And they had a reached a critical number of mutant cows in their inventory of livestock that could still give surplus milk after weaning their calves.

A small group of mutant people with a small herd of mutant cows.
Thats who the proto Indoeuropeans were.

They were the first tribe that didnt need to kill their cows to get protein- like everyone else had to at the time. They had a unique ability to literally milk their cows for protein.

This enabled the tribe to migrate across the vast expanses of the central asian steppe- with the cows living off grass- and the people living off the cows. And enabled them to conquer sendentary peoples they encountered.
Their cows enabled them to eventually spread and to dominate and to linguistically assimilate the world that stretches from Assam to Iceland.

The problem with that is that the Tocharians' DNA did not trace from Turkey/Iran or India at all. The mummies were well preserved enough to test their DNA, and the (many) samples placed their ancestors in Western Russia/Eastern/Northern Europe. They even had a direct living descendant in Spain (or Italy, I think?). It was only later that the Tocharian blood was infused with both Mongol and Turkic influences as those people groups spread throughout known history.

Yes the mummified remains of the tocharians show that they were very cacausain-even scandanavian looking- reddish haired people.

And the chinese chronicles testify to that as well.

So they - and maybe the PIE people themselves did in fact come from the Pontic region north of the Black Sea.

The PIE languages are divided between the Centum Languages, and the Sateem languages. The ones that call the number 100 by a cognate of the Latin "Centum" ( our word "hundred" is related to "centum", believe it or not) share certain traits, and those that call it by a cognate with the Sanskrit "Sateem" share other traits.

The Sateem languages are eastern: Indic, Iranian, Armenian, Slavic, and Baltic. The Centum languages are Western: Romance, Greek, Germanic, and Celtic. But the Tocharian language is the farthest east of all the Indoeuropean languages, but its a Centum language.

So its a mystery.

Such a fascinating mystery. I'm planning on publishing research on it sometime soon, within the next few years.

Keep me posted about it.

There is a boundry, if your language has six to eight hundred words, it will have that many ten thousand years later, but if it crosses twelve to fifteen hundred words, it will add a new one next week.

Indo European was the first large vocabulary, the rest is accents. Other language groups reached this threshold later, much later.

The first is 45,000 years ago, and it did spread with the people, Turkey, around the Black Sea, and to China and France.

Other language groups came much later, as Pigden, Creole, are still forming. Borneo had six hundred a hundred years ago, and through loan words crossed the boundry.

I think the Kura Valley, now Georgia, was the original homeland, and they were isolated for a long time.

"The Kurgan Hypothesis, for example, places the PIE Urheimat in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe roughly, Ukraine)"...ok,..then why in iran they say madar or mader for mother and in italy they say madre and in england they say mother ...so so similar to each other but not similar to word for mother in the allegedly original source of their language around ukraine area (maty)??! !...statstcally it is very improbable that original word for mother was something else and then ACCIDENTALLY ! ! they become mader in iran and madre in italy and mother in england...but if we assume that the original homeland of PIE language was today's iran area , all the pieces of puzzle match together like a jigsaw puzzle...yes there have been an aryan invasion, but starting point and homeland of those invaders was iran ...there are many similar example words that match between iran and western europe but don't match so easily to ukraine area , you can find those words in my video on youtube by username of drycity and title of 83 persian words , of course now about 217 persian words common with other indo-european languages like these numbered words : 2 thunder , persian tondar , ukrainian : hrim ...4 breast or chest , persian see-neh , irish ; see-ne = nipple , ukrainian : hrudy , ... 10 on foot , persian : piadeh , italian : a piedi , ukrainian : pishky ,...12 enough , persian : bass or baste( it's enough) , italian & spanish : basta , ukrainian : dosyt ....23 father . persian : pedar , italian : padre , ukrainian : batko , ...39 star , persian set areh , ukrainian : zirka ,.... 46 WATER , persian : aab , sardinian : aba , old persian : ap , romanian : apă, ukrainian : vody....83 , "BE" as a prefix , persian : benevis , german : bemerken , english : beloved or behold , ukrainian and those areas "be" doesn't exist ....182 , sneeze , khansari persian : shneezeh , ukrainian : chkhaty ,... 213 year , avestan persian : yaare , german : jahr (yaar) , dutch : jaar ( yaar) ,ukrainian : pik,....