Proto-Indo-Europeans  

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The Proto-Indo-Europeans are the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). PIE is a reconstruction of a prehistoric language, fraught with significant uncertainties and room for speculation, and its speakers cannot be assumed to be a single identifiable prehistoric people or tribe but rather a group of loosely related populations ancestral to the later, still partially prehistoric, Bronze Age Indo-European expansion movements, by the mid 2nd millennium BC reaching Anatolia, the Aegean, Northern India and likely Western Europe.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans in this sense likely correspond to populations of the Chalcolithic, or roughly the 5th to 4th millennia BC. Mainstream scholarship places them in the general region of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Some scholars would extend the time depth of PIE or pre-PIE to the Neolithic or even the last glacial maximum and suggest alternative location hypotheses.

Knowledge of them comes chiefly from linguistic reconstruction, paired with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics.

Evidence For Proto-Indo-Europeans

The Proto-Indo-Europeans are defined as the people who spoke the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. Thus the basic information about these pre-historic people arises out of the comparative linguistics of the Indo-European languages as well as the historic record of the spread of the Indo-European languages and the histories of the peoples speaking those languages. This may be augmented by comparing what may be deduced from these languages and histories with studies in archaeology and genetics. That is to say given the information present in the Indo-European languages and the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, one may attempt to link this information with results arrived at in archaeology and genetics to construct a more complete picture of the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves.

See also

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Proto-Indo-Europeans" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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