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Were Kurgan horsemen or Anatolian farmers responsible for creating and spreading the world's most far-flung language family?
Around 6500 years ago, a group of seminomadic warriors arose on the treeless steppes north of the Black Sea. They herded sheep and goats, and they tamed the wild horse. Their language was rich with words reflecting their pastoral way of life. When one of their warrior-chiefs died, he was buried with great ceremony under a large earth mound called a kurgan. After about 1000 years of restless existence on the barren steppes, the story goes, these nomads went in search of new grazing land, riding out of their homeland between the Dnieper and Volga rivers armed with bows and arrows, spears, and bronze daggers. Over the next 2 millennia, the horsemen swept into eastern and central Europe, Anatolia, and much of western Asia, bringing their culture and colorful language with them. Before long, the hills of Europe and Asia echoed with the gallop of horses' hooves and the strongly enunciated vowels and consonants of a new language, which linguists today call Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
The "Kurgan hypothesis," as this dramatic account of the spread of the IndoEuropean language family during the Early Bronze Age is known, was the dominant paradigm among linguists and archaeologists during much of the 20th century. It is most closely associated with the late Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose visions of prehistory were often filled with romantic pageantry. She argued that the Kurgans overrode existing matriarchal, Mother Goddessworshipping societies, imposing their warrior religion as well as their patriarchal culture throughout Europe and western Asia. But the theory caught on for much more pragmatic reasons: It seemed to solve the long-standing mystery of the origins of IndoEuropean, a closely related group of 144 tongues that today are spoken on every continent. The family includes English as well as all of the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indian, and Iranian languages (see tree diagram).
In 1973, however, Cambridge University archaeologist Colin Renfrew proposed that the driving force behind the propagation of the Indo-European languages was not the fast gallop of horses' hooves but the slow adoption of farming. Renfrew argued that the gradual expansion of the agricultural way...