Indo-European migrations
The Indo-European migrations are hypothesized migrations of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) speakers, and subsequent migrations of people speaking derived Indo-European languages, which took place approx. 4000 to 1000 BCE, potentially explaining how these languages came to be spoken across a large area of Eurasia, spanning from the Indian subcontinent and Iranian plateau to Atlantic Europe, in a process of cultural diffusion. While there can be no direct evidence of prehistoric languages, a synthesis of linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and genetics establishes both the existence of Proto-Indo-European and the spread of its daughter dialects through migrations of large populations of its speakers, as well as the recruitment of new speakers through emulation of conquering elites. Comparative linguistics describes the similarities between various languages and the laws of systematic change, which allow the reconstruction of ancestral speech. Archaeology traces the spread of artifacts, habitations, and burial sites presumed to be created by speakers of Proto-Indo-European in several stages: from the hypothesized locations of the Proto-Indo-European homeland, into their later locations of Western Europe as well as Central, South and Eastern Asia. These changes occurred by migrations and by language shift through elite-recruitment as described by anthropological research. Recent genetic research has increasingly contributed to understanding the kinship relations among prehistoric cultures. According to the widely held Kurgan hypothesis, or renewed Steppe hypothesis, the oldest migration branch produced the Anatolian languages which split from the earliest proto-Indo-European speech community inhabiting the Volga basin. The second-oldest branch language group, Tocharian, was spoken in the Tarim Basin, after splitting from early PIE spoken on the eastern Pontic steppe. The bulk of the Indo-European languages developed from late PIE, which according to this hypothesis was spoken within the Yamnaya horizon on the Pontic–Caspian steppe around 3000 BCE.
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