The main issues in this portion are its conclusion at the end that “in the weakest version of the Indo-Hittite theory the time-frame is imagined as only a few centuries, it is more likely here that we are dealing with a few millennia”. There is no actual citation given for this,

I don’t really have an issue with attacking folk migrations the way he lays out here.

Where I do have an issue, however, is his repeating after Renfrew that there likely was no migratory replacement of established people in Britain by the Beaker folk. We in fact know that there was around **90%** genetic turnover and a large-scale replacement of male lineages.

There is no “growing evidence that the Anatolian language family was indigenous to south-central and western Anatolia”. There simply is not. The date ranges outlined above are specifically correlated with the Steppe Hypothesis for the origins of the entire language family,

I don’t really have any criticisms of this little tangent into Neolithic/Anatolian history. I will point out, however, that an aspect of Renfrew’s skepticism towards a steppe expansion into Europe was that the steppes could not support as-large a population as sedentary,

Ditto above

A very problematic excerpt from Drews. Not only do we have evidence of a migration into Anatolia now, from the Reich lab (Lazaridis et al 2025, “The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans”), but even prior to this there were many issues. Mallory lays out that linguists and

It’s fair to simply state that no linguist that I know of accepts Minoan as an Indo-Hittite language: this is likely connected with pre-Indo-Hittite language and culture; Burkert in “Greek Religion” has a good summary of this. Etruscan as Anatolian has also been posited, as Drews

No. See all the scholars and works mentioned above: Mallory, Anthony, Kloekhorst, Pereltsvaig & Lewis, recent Harvard work, etc. I should take the time here to point out a few more issues that are present with Drews’ hypothesis, specifically to do with horses. For one thing,

Now we get into the question of Proto-Indo-European proper, and we’re not off to a good start. As we will see, Drews will argue that Early European Farmers would bring languages to the steppe via following the Black Sea coast. For one thing, this immediately contradicts his prior

I don’t really have many problems with this section beyond the specific framing of Indo-Hittite Drews presents, although there are still quietly problems for him as he refutes the North European hypothesis: why would Indo-Hittite speakers “hive off” (by sea, no less) to the arid

Nothing really to say here except that I don’t see the supposed “Black Sea flood” ever discussed in modern treatments of the Neolithic or Indo-European expansions.

This is a real doozy. The notion of a seaborne migration seems, I’ll just say it, insane to me. The reason Neolithic settlers migrated to the Greek Islands and Europe over water is because they had to: Anatolia is separated from Europe, so one must at least cross the Turkish

This is where it gets bad. “The Neolithic settlers, who must have come by sea…” with a citation at the very end. That citation is for Dolukhanov et al 2009. I read the paper: it has nothing to do with a migration by sea. It’s about pottery and the diffusion of the Neolithic, but

Nothing really to say here. It’s just a framing for what will follow.

Now we get into Maykop. There is no doubt that Maykop had a massive influence on the Proto-Indo-Europeans, culturally-speaking, and Drews’ triangulation of the geography here maps nicely to what the recent 2025 papers (“The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans” and “A Genomic

Indeed, a better candidate has come along: the CLV people and the later Yamnaya, not to do with the Maykop. I will also elaborate, however, on the influence of Maykop on Proto-Indo-European. We know they didn’t really intermarry, despite a few outlier samples. It has long been

I don’t have an issue with most of this excerpt. Where I will disagree with Drews concerns the intensity and completeness of nomadism on the steppes: all the evidence we have is that the Yamnaya east of its westernmost expressions were entirely nomadic. As Drews says, we don’t

I don’t have complaints about this section, and in my opinion it’s the best bit from Chapter One.

I don’t really have complaints about this section. A few quibbles, sure, and the thing about the mummies turned out to not be right, but that’s of no material relevance and he couldn’t have known any better at the time, anyway. The main issue is with his treatment of

His insinuation (or statement, depending on how you read it) is that the Yamnaya ancestry associated with the Corded Ware culture brought Proto-Baltic. This is important for him, as he believes that Italo-Celtic and Germanic languages (or perhaps, rather, their ancestors) were

@GrecoPhilistine Great thread. > it’s looking increasingly likely that Proto-Balto-Slavic is a subclade of a larger group: the Satem group, or Indo-Slavonic What is making this increasingly likely?

@atijivashastra Thank you, friend! I say that for a combination of linguistic, archaeological, and genetic reasons

@GrecoPhilistine Any recommended sources on the linguistics reasons? The only evidence I'm aware of is the classic sound laws.

@atijivashastra That's what I'm referring to as well, but I know that Patterson and Anthony have both put a lot of stock in Indo-Slavonic based on their linguist friends. Interestingly Kümmel and Pronk, in the contributions for Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic in "The Indo-European Language Family:

@GrecoPhilistine I wouldn't put too much stock in "and they're basically interchangeable". They're mostly similar because Sanskrit is old and Lithuanian is conservative. Plus, as some Russians will be quick to tell you,

@GrecoPhilistine the notion of Russian being particularly close to Sanskrit was astroturfed by the USSR, and it would be unsurprising for Lithuanian to be a similar case. The few times I've learned a Slavic word and observed that Sanskrit is the only language I know with a cognate,

@GrecoPhilistine it has usually turned out to be a borrowing (e.g. bog, "god", from Iranian) or to reflect a gap in my knowledge of the other daughters. Anthony's story about Balto-Slavic was never quite clear to me; as I recall, he connects it with Balanovo,

@GrecoPhilistine but then makes Balanovo the ancestor of Abashevo, Sintashta and Srubnaya, all putatively Iranian,

@GrecoPhilistine without explaining when and where Balto-Slavic is supposed to have split off; as if Balto-Slavic "evolved into" Indo-Iranian during its eastward expansion while remaining Balto-Slavic in situ in order to give rise to BS hydronyms. To be a bit more charitable,

@atijivashastra I was under the impression Anthony connects a Balto-Slavic dialect continuum with the whole of Fatyanovo-Balanovo; I didn't think that he thought the Balanovo extension of Fatyanovo specifically spoke Balto-Slavic, as the range is too eastern for BS. I was under the impression he

@GrecoPhilistine @atijivashastra Have to abandon middle dnieper as important here. Middle dnieper is quite late (2600bc) and fatyanovo therefore predates it, while having connections to the baltic CWC, and the Subcarpsthian CWC. Subcarpathian CWC in general could be more important to BS than i prev assumed-

@GrecoPhilistine @atijivashastra -because the succession of culture is CWC subcarpathian -> Epicordedware ESKK -> Trziniec-komarov-sosnitsa -> milograd, chernoles etcetera, which are most probably the origin of the slavs

@Light3675 @GrecoPhilistine @atijivashastra

@VVeltkrieger @Light3675 @GrecoPhilistine @atijivashastra Where does Battle Axe fit into this?

@kyudoesstuff @Light3675 @GrecoPhilistine @atijivashastra Only relevant here in possible association with fatyanovo in the earliest stage

@VVeltkrieger @Light3675 @GrecoPhilistine @atijivashastra DNA-wise Balto-Slavs seem to originate from an archaeologically unknown east Baltic population, rich with WHG admixture and Y-DNA R1a-Z280, which replaces Battle Axe around 2200 BC.