Proto-Indo-Europeans

Proto-Indo-Europeans are the hypothesized prehistoric speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Their homeland, movements, and archaeological identity remain subjects of scholarly debate.

Pontic–Caspian steppe hypothesis: The hypothesis that Proto-Indo-European originated among pastoralists of the Pontic–Caspian steppe. It is the leading model linking the speakers to steppe pastoralist expansions.
Proto-Indo-European language: The reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, inferred by comparing its descendants. It is the language attributed to the hypothesized population.
Proto-language: A hypothetical ancestral language reconstructed from similarities among related languages. Proto-Indo-European is a major example of a reconstructed proto-language.
Indo-European urheimat: The homeland from which the Indo-European languages are proposed to have spread. Its location remains disputed despite linguistic, archaeological, and genetic research.
Anatolian hypothesis: The hypothesis that Proto-Indo-European spread from Anatolia with the expansion of early farming. It proposes an earlier, farming-based homeland rather than a steppe origin.
Indo-European languages: A language family spread across much of Europe and parts of Asia, descended from a common ancestor. Their distribution is the historical outcome that homeland and migration models seek to explain.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how they are related over time. Its methods establish linguistic ancestry without directly identifying a population's biology.
Language family: A group of languages descended from a common ancestral language. Shared language ancestry does not prove that all speakers belonged to one biological population.
Kurgan hypothesis: A model associating early Indo-European dispersal with steppe cultures that built burial mounds called kurgans. It helped shape the archaeological case for a steppe homeland.
Comparative method: A linguistic method that reconstructs ancestral languages by comparing systematic correspondences among related languages. It provides evidence for reconstructing the language associated with this population.

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