For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the ‘Steppe’ hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the ...

Paul Heggarty and colleagues present a new framework for the chronology and divergence of languages in the Indo-European family, which places the family’s origin at around 8300 BP – older than ...

Recent linguistic studies, particularly the extension of structural analysis to the syntactic component of language and improved typological analysis, have made possible an increased understanding of ...

About 5,000 years ago, a group of herders living in the grasslands north of the Black Sea headed west, taking their animals with them. They got as far as the Carpathian Basin — the western extremity ...

Genetic evidence is consistent with the view that the Indo-European languages were propagated in Europe by the diffusion of early farmers. The existence of phylogenetic relationships between European ...