Where is the Indo-European Homeland?

The Indo-European Languages gives us languages as diverse as Nepali and Sardinian, Russian and Germany, Welsh and Persian. But where is the common root they come from, and where is the land they came from? In this video, we look at this large group of language families and consider some of the theories about their mysterious origins and put forward a theory taking in all of these into consideration. By the end of this video your knowledge of Indo-European History will be much greater.

00:00 Beginning
00:12 Families
02:15 Steppe Theory
04:45 Armenian Theory
07:31 Centum & Sentum
09:34 Anatolian Theory
11:44 My Theory
18:35 Yamnaya Culture
19:38 New Branches
21:21 What do you think

Pixabay, Pexels.

[h.m.]

7:41 one nitpicky comment: there is no "Sentum" group of IE languages. The typology was hinted by how the numeral one hundred (100) is pronounced in various IE languages and the models were: Latin 'centum' /kentum/ and Avestan 'satem'. The latter has cognates in Old Church Slavonic 'suto' (which gave Romanian 'suta'), Sanskrit 'sata' etc. The differentiation between centum and satem languages is a very early one (around 3rd millenium BC).
As for the French having 'cent' /sant/, we should consider that the centum/satem classification applies to the proto-languages out of which the modern European languages derive.
Similarly to French, Italian also pronounces 'cento' in a satem-like manner, even though it is derived from Latin (an Italic, centum language) with elements from a Germanic adstratum (also, a centum type). The apparent "satemization" in daughter-languages does not change the character of the mother-language.
Apart from that, a new great clip, with good information.

[lynettecockburn]

Great video. I love your map of Wales!

[augustozambrano]

Well, I enjoyed this video quite a lot. The topic is fascinating and your theory was very well presented. Thank you for sharing so much information, and on top of that, your own intellectual contributions!

[psychedelicfoundry]

Yeah, I have a pretty good grasp on this subject. I don't think you really understand the steppe hypothesis in its totality with today's genetic research. Sredny Stog or even earlier Dnieper-Donets culture is like the true origin. Migrants from Sredny Stog are the likely vectors for hittites along with the cernavoda cultures, among others migrating into the balkans. There was another round of climate change that caused the later catacombs culture to migrate south to Greece and Armenia around 2000 BC. This is a pattern you see both from the steppe and from scandinavia later on. The population builds up until the climate gets bad, and then large numbers of people migrate south to better climates to survive due to limited resources. Once you see the genetic research along with historical linguistics, it's really almost impossible for it to be anything else but the steppe hypothesis in its modern form. Do you speak Korean? Do you live in a culture where everyone else speaks Korean? Surely, there have been multilingual people forever. That's not same as you being Korean, though. Anyway, my backround is in biology, and while I agree, something like what you have mentioned happened, these were not the indo europeans migrating north. These people had little genetic impact on any of the following people that spoke indo-european languages. It would be really weird for dozens of entirely separate ethnographic populations to adopt foreign languages from this population as opposed to the population that genetics showed is shared between nearly all modern speakers of Indo-European languages.

[devadattaua]

Ваші тлумачення достатньо обгрунтовані і заслуговують на особливу увагу. Дякую за Вашу працю!

[GeraldM_inNC]

I heard that the botanical evidence is conclusive. Scholars looked for words for trees and plants that are shared by every I-E language, and it turned out that some of those shared words grow in one and only one place.

[seustaceRotterdam]

I always read that it came from the Steppes, but your theory seems to make sense to me.

What about the non- Indo-European languages, can we even dig deeper and find one common ancestor or did several languages emerge in parallel?

[peterkratoska]

The forest terms, and woodland animals and lack of ocean or marine terms help to locate the original homeland but there are the common cognates for the wheel and axle and wagon categories - which we know appeared at a certain time from the archaeology and more importantly the level of technical development needed to make wheels and axles.

This seems to be around the end of the chalcolithic (copper) age ~ 3500 bc.

The anatolian and hittite separation must be before the wheel as hittite does not have the wheel cognates.

[maciejmaciej]

Well done Comrieg, diolh, greetings from Poland. Thank you for this channel. Very unteresting knowledge to compare many hipothesis and theories.

[OrpheoTreshula]

I love your work. I also have respect for the traditional theories, but I've been leaning towards Afghanistan or Northern Iran for some time, for largely but not exclusively other reasons. I can't express my joy at seeing you have a similar hypothesis.

[bretrohde]

Good stuff! One of my pet topics, or at least I like to play with these theories from time to time. I am inclined towards the Anatolian or Armenian hypotheses, not merely because they are novel and interesting in their own right (poor reasons for sure), but particularly because of the laryngeals found in the Anatolian branches. Something about this, and the (well-formulated) idea that these three or four laryngeals became expressed, each in their specific way, in the phonetics of classically-constructed PIE, makes the theory very tempting. I eagerly await the results of further research.

Thanks again, Ben!

[Shoey]

very interesting, between linguistics, genetics and archeology I still think that the Steppe theory connects the most dots, but I appreciate this well thought out alternate theory never hurts to keep an open mind

[fivantvcs]

Very interesting ! Bravo! I like very much the video. I think your theory of North Caspian homeland is very probable.

Melhor explicação de sempre. Best ever on this matter. Parabéns. Video on repeat.

[lordcommandernox]

In Portuguese, we say "lã" which is pronounced very similarly to Welsh.

[jeffbreezee]

I like your theory. It makes sense to me because after studying the Steppe hypothesis for a long time, it left me with a lot of questions.

[peterotvos]

I'm just a layman, but your theory on the indoeuropization of Greece does not sound right to me. Hittite can't be an ancestor for Greek, first because of the relatively big distance between the two, second because traces of Hittite and Greek appear almost simultaneously.

[acaydia]

Your theory makes the most sense to me thus far.

[ForageGardener]

The armenian hypothesis is a desirable hypothesis. At least a step in the chain possibily. The fact georgian languages are between is not controversial. Mountains protect langauges in days of foot travel. All that needed to happen is the PIE armenian types moved north. And they may have even traversed though modern iran around the caspian for all we know

[ArcaneUniverse-]

Wow! The way you explain this mystery is mind-blowing! 🔍✨ Keep up the great work!