Origins of the Proto-Indo Europeans

By popular demand! (oh ok - one person did ask).

I have learned from reading Brian Fagan (see my post on 20 favorite books) that around 5000 years ago the Black Sea was only a large lake down in the lowest part of the Black Sea basin. It was a fresh water lake and is called the Euxine Lake by those studying it. There were small agricultural villages along its shores and various hunters and gatherers in the hinterlands and up in the rising slopes of the depression.

Around 4500 BC the Mediterranean Sea burst through the heights that separate it from the Euxine basin and created a spectacular waterfall jetting out into the depression. The resulting flood, moving about as fast as a slow walk, inundated the entire basin, created the Black Sea, and drove all of the farming communities out of the area - running for their lives no doubt.

Think of the Euxine basin as a tube of toothpaste that has been stepped on. All those people have to squirt somewhere. The farmers go up the great river valleys in every direction. It forces the spread of agricultural communities into Europe and out towards the Ukraine and points east. There is probably a reflux of farmers back into Anatolia as well.

Who were these people? The origins of the original Euxine farmers would probably be Anatolia which some, though not many, have seen as the original homeland of the proto-Indo-Europeans. If so, then obviously many of those down in the basin who had to flee upland would also have been PIE people.

This is what I think happened: A wave of earlier farmers using all the techniques pioneered by the ancient Middle East, moved across Anatolia into the great Euxine basin, establishing settlements around the lake. These were the ancestors of the PIE people (the Proto-proto-Indo-Europeans?). Then came the great flood and the settlements scattered - these refugees are the PIE people, speaking a language that was fairly unified at the time of the flood. As they spread outwards their language develops into various dialects and then into distinct languages. These languages would be what we call the Indo-European languages which stretch from Ireland to China and from Scandinavia to India.

This theory (not well thought out yet) does explain several puzzling aspects of Indo-European. One, how can we postulate one distinct homeland, a fixed version of the PIE language, when language is constantly in flux and changing. This theory fixes PIE to about 5000-4500 BC in a fairly localized region - the shores of the Euxine Lake. Two, the trail of ancestral PIE dialects across Anatolia would explain the position of Hittite. While the language of the ancient Hittites, or Nusli, is clearly related to Indo-European languages, it is different enough that some historical linguists see it as a sister language rather than a daughter language. In other words it is not a development of PIE but the daughter of the same language that gave birth to PIE.

It's just a theory and needs more work, but it's worth considering I think.