lpetrich
Contributor
The article then went into the issue of the homeland of the ancestral Indo-European speakers. That has been much debated since the recognition of the Indo-European family in the early 19th cy., with numerous hypotheses proposed.
A little over a century ago, German scholar Gustav Kossinna proposed northern Germany was the IE homeland. German nationalists loved that idea, and the Nazis were extreme German nationalists. "Aryan" is an old Indo-Iranian self-designation, roughly meaning "noble", and that used to be a common synonym for "early Indo-European". With the curious consequence that some of the Nazis' targets, the Roma, had better claim on "Aryan" than they did.
A recent proposal has been Colin Renfrew's proposal that it was Neolithic farmers who brought the IE languages with them. Since they did not mix very much as they spread outward, they would have brought their languages with them as they went. But there are linguistic difficulties with CR's hypothesis, like vocabulary mismatch and a poor match between Neolithic spread and Indo-European dialect relationships.
But the most successful so far has been the Kurgan hypothesis, named after the kurgans or burial mounds associated with Yamnaya and related cultures. It is that the PIE speakers were the Yamnaya people or predecessors of them. It agrees with the linguistic evidence: words for horses and wheels and axles and the like. It also fits in well with the spread of Yamnaya people into Europe.
It's another slap in the face to Nazi ideology, because it's south Russians who are the original "Aryans" in this scenario. The Nazis considered Slavs "untermenschen", subhuman people, and they wanted to conquer territories where Slavs lived, turn them into German colonies complete with German settlers, and pretty much enslave the Slavic inhabitants. Those territories were to become Lebensraum (habitat, living space) for the German people. To quote Adolf Hitler himself, in a speech to his generals just before invading the Soviet Union, "As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp !" (The Holocaust-Denial Debate)
A little over a century ago, German scholar Gustav Kossinna proposed northern Germany was the IE homeland. German nationalists loved that idea, and the Nazis were extreme German nationalists. "Aryan" is an old Indo-Iranian self-designation, roughly meaning "noble", and that used to be a common synonym for "early Indo-European". With the curious consequence that some of the Nazis' targets, the Roma, had better claim on "Aryan" than they did.
A recent proposal has been Colin Renfrew's proposal that it was Neolithic farmers who brought the IE languages with them. Since they did not mix very much as they spread outward, they would have brought their languages with them as they went. But there are linguistic difficulties with CR's hypothesis, like vocabulary mismatch and a poor match between Neolithic spread and Indo-European dialect relationships.
But the most successful so far has been the Kurgan hypothesis, named after the kurgans or burial mounds associated with Yamnaya and related cultures. It is that the PIE speakers were the Yamnaya people or predecessors of them. It agrees with the linguistic evidence: words for horses and wheels and axles and the like. It also fits in well with the spread of Yamnaya people into Europe.
It's another slap in the face to Nazi ideology, because it's south Russians who are the original "Aryans" in this scenario. The Nazis considered Slavs "untermenschen", subhuman people, and they wanted to conquer territories where Slavs lived, turn them into German colonies complete with German settlers, and pretty much enslave the Slavic inhabitants. Those territories were to become Lebensraum (habitat, living space) for the German people. To quote Adolf Hitler himself, in a speech to his generals just before invading the Soviet Union, "As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp !" (The Holocaust-Denial Debate)