Steppe Migrations and the Indo-European Spread

The question of where and when the Proto-Indo-European language was originally spoken - the ancestor of languages as varied as English, Russian, Persian, and Hindi - has long divided linguists and archaeologists. Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, beginning with work published in 1956, proposed what became known as the Kurgan hypothesis, locating the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe of modern Ukraine and southern Russia, named for the characteristic kurgan burial mounds of the region's Bronze Age pastoralist cultures. A rival account, the Anatolian hypothesis, was proposed by archaeologist Colin Renfrew in Archaeology and Language (1987), which instead linked the spread of Indo-European languages to the expansion of Neolithic farming out of Anatolia beginning several thousand years earlier.