Possibly the ancestors of a number of ancient peoples who inhabited Europe and western Asia, including Mesopotamia. The term Indo-European was initially mainly a linguistic one and referred to a proposed very ancient, ancestral language that may have given birth to many later languages. However, over time most scholars came to believe that there was also an ancestral Indo-European people, sometimes called the Proto-Indo-Europeans. If they did exist, the location of their original homeland is still a matter of considerable dispute. The two chief theories place that homeland either in southern Russia, just north and east of the Black Sea, or in Anatolia. Supposedly, sometime in the late Stone Age they spread outward in all directions and settled Europe, including Greece, Italy, and Germany; Anatolia; Armenia; Iran; and northern India. Noted University of Cambridge scholar Colin Renfrew recently suggested that the Indo-Europeans originated in Anatolia, where they invented agriculture and subsequently introduced it to neighboring peoples, including those who lived in the Fertile Crescent and later brought it to Mesopotamia. There may well be something to this idea. In the late 1990s Columbia University scientists William Ryan and Walter Pitman presented convincing evidence for a large-scale natural disaster in the Black Sea region north of Anatolia in the sixth millennium B. C. They believe that this catastrophe triggered the Indo-European migrations, including those into the Fertile Crescent. For the time being, however, the scholarly community as a whole remains uncertain about the origins of the Indo-Europeans.
See Also: Fertile Crescent; flood legends; languages
World History
