New research traces the source of the IndoEuropean languages to a location about 6,500 years ago. This is about a thousand years earlier than the Yamnaya people who invented the wheel. The authors of this hew method used genetic evidence to determine the location and the estimated date when the speakers of the protolanguage began to spread.
This new location is farther south than the Yamnaya source, and that puts it closer to the Hittites, who spoke an early version of IndoEuropean. That may be the reason why Hittite is quite a bit different from other IndoEuropen languages, which may have diverged from the Yamnayas about a thousand years later.
Following are the first few paragraphs. The full article includes a map.
John
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Researchers place Caucasus Lower Volga people, speakers of ancestor tongue, in today’s Russia about 6,500 years ago
A pair of landmark studies, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40 percent of the world’s population.
DNA evidence places them in current-day Russia during the Eneolithic period about 6,500 years ago. These linguistic pioneers were spread from the steppe grasslands along the lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, with researchers dubbing them the Caucasus Lower Volga people. Genetic results show they mixed with other groups in the region.
“It’s a very early manifestation of some of the cultural traditions that later spread across the steppe,” said senior author David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and human evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. . .