Indo-European migrations

The Indo-European migrations were the migrations of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) speakers, as proposed by contemporary scholarship, and the subsequent migrations of people speaking further developed Indo-European languages, which explains why the Indo-European languages are spoken in a large area from India and Iran to Europe.

• The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin, Sanskrit, French, Swedish, Persian, and so forth) or as the group of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens.
  • Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p.2

• Our knowledge of these migrations [that broke PIE unity] is very limited. On a linguistic basis, little can be said about them.
  • Robert S. P. Beekes 1990:70., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south.
  • Crossland, R. A. 1971 “Immigrants from the North.” Chap. 28 of Cambridge Ancient History. 3d ed. Vol. 1, p art 2: 824—76. p 826 Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. quoted in Sir Edmund Leach. Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990,

• In the current state of knowledge, none of the hypotheses forwarded can be seriously demonstrated...
  There is in fact no evidence for the gradual progression of an entire material culture from the shores of the Black Sea to those of the Atlantic or the Ganges—unless, of course, we drastically force the data.
  • Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans, Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West

• It is presumptuous to say the least to claim that the migratory routes traveled by the Indo-Europeans from their original Homeland have now been clearly traced.
  • Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans, Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West

• We do not find any evidence for the diffusion of the entire material culture of the steppes to those regions where historically attested Indo-European languages were spoken
  • Demoule, Jean-Paul (2016). The canonical Indo-European model and its underlying assumptions, FAITS DE LANGUES Comparatisme et reconstruction: tendances actuelles

• The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles’ migration of the tribes themselves.
  • I.M. Diakonov: “On the Original Home of the Speakers of Indo-European”, Journal of Indo-Europen Studies, 1-2/1985, p.153-154., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• But in the period 3100-2900 BC came a clear and dramatic infusion of Yamna [= Pontic] cultural practice, including burials, into Eastern Hungary and along the lower Danube. With this we are able to witness the beginnings of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe.
  • Fortson, Benjamin, 2004: Indo-European Language and Culture. An Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford. Fortson (2004:42-43) quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• Europeans today are a mixture of three very different ancestral populations: hunter-gatherers, first farmers, and a population with eastern affinities that was not yet present in Europe at the time of the first farmers. It was unclear when and how this eastern component arrived in Europe... ‘When we first looked at the new data, it was a Eureka moment’ ... ‘The eastern ancestry was present in every single sample starting at around 4,500 years ago, and absent in every single one before that time.’
  • Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. Nature, 2 March 2015 (doi:10.1038/nature14317). David Reich, Iosif Lazaridis et al.