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The Anatolian hypothesis of Proto-Indo-European origin is the suggestion that the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) lived in Anatolia during the Neolithic era, and associates the distribution of historical Indo-European languages with the expansion during the Neolithic revolution during the seventh and sixth millennia.
The hypothesis\' main proponent was Colin Renfrew, who in 1987 suggested a peaceful Indo-Europeanization of Europe from Anatolia from around 7000 BC with the advance of farming by demic diffusion ("wave of advance"). Accordingly, most of the inhabitants of Neolithic Europe would have spoken Indo-European tongues, and later migrations would at best have replaced Indo-European dialects with other Indo-European dialects. However, Renfrew has since modified his view and this is discussed below.
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According to Renfrew (2003), the spread of Indo-European proceeded in the following steps:
Renfrew\'s 2003 scenario qualifies as an "Indo-Hittite" model, separating Anatolian from all other branches around 6500 BC, more than a millennium before the next split at 5000 BC. The Balkans qualifies as a "secondary Urheimat" (6500-3000 BC), from which he derives the Satem groups and Greek, at a time (3000 BC) compatible with the Kurgan timeframe, qualifying the suggestion further as a Graeco-Aryan (and Graeco-Armenian) model.
However, his early separation (5000 BC) of "Northwestern IE" (Germanic, Celtic and Italic, compare Alteuropäisch) from "Balkan PIE" (Graeco-Aryan-Balto-Slavic) postulates 1500 years of common evolution of Graeco-Aryan-Balto-Slavic after separation from the Northwestern dialects. This is incompatible with the Kurgan topology of the Indo-European family tree, and with mainstream linguistics which places Balto-Slavic no closer to Indo-Iranian than to Germanic or Italic. The postulation of early "Northwestern IE" separation is thus the core claim of this scenario, without which the model would become equivalent to an extreme Indo-Hittite view with a Balkans homeland of the non-Anatolian branches.
The main strength of the farming hypothesis lies in its linking of the spread of Indo-European languages with an archeologically known event (the spread of farming) that is often assumed as involving significant population shifts. On archaeogenetic evidence, the actual population shift (associated with Y-chromosomal haplogroup G) was still minor compared to the component of autochthonous continuity (going back to the re-settlement of Europe following the last glacial maximum), but it was probably slightly larger than the component due to later migrations.
Gray and Atkinson (2003) claimed glottochronological evidence (using phylogenetic techniques from evolutionary biology) for PIE dating to the 8th or even 9th millennium, concluding that their findings support Renfrew\'s theory over the Kurgan model.
While the Anatolian theory enjoyed brief support when first proposed, the Indo-Europeanist community in general now rejects it[citation needed], its majority clearly favouring the Kurgan hypothesis postulating a 4th millennium expansion from the Pontic steppe. While the spread of farming undisputedly constituted an important event, most see no case to connect it with Indo-Europeans in particular, seeing that terms for animal husbandry tend to have much better reconstructions than terms related to agriculture. The linguistic community further notes that linguistic evidence suggests a later date for Proto-Indo-European than the Anatolian theory predicts.
Most Indo-Europeanists\' estimates of dating PIE lie between 4500 and 2500 BC: It is unlikely that late PIE (even after the separation of the Anatolian branch) post-dates 2500 BC, since Proto-Indo-Iranian is usually dated to just before 2000 BC. On the other hand, it is unlikely that early PIE predates 4500 BC, because the reconstructed vocabulary clearly indicates a culture spanning the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, with knowledge of the wheel, metalworking and the domestication of the horse. This is in stark contrast to the early Neolithic (8th millennium) date of Gray and Atkinson, which, even if accepted, loses significance in distinguishing between the Anatolian and the Kurgan model with Renfrew\'s 2003 revision postulating a secondary Urheimat in 5000 BC, not 7000 BC.
Reconstructions of a Bronze Age PIE society based on vocabulary items like "wheel" do not necessarily hold for the Anatolian branch, which is more frequently admitted to have possibly separated in the Chalcolithic. In Renfrew\'s revised 2003 scheme, thus, the "wheel" or "horse" criticism applies only to the "Northwestern IE"/"Balkan PIE"/"Early Steppe PIE" split at 5000 BC. Renfrew\'s revised "Indo-Hittite" scenario has thus approached the Kurgan model at least in terms of time depth, with a split of "PIE proper" in 5000 BC, essentially proposing a timeframe of the order of one millennium earlier than that of the mainstream view, as opposed to four millennia in earlier versions.
Anatolian hypothesis falters on at least two major counts. In the first place, if the Europeans, on the one hand, and the Indo-Iranians, on the other, had once lived together as agriculturists in Anatolia, they ought to have a common vocabulary for agricultural items, which unfortunately is not the case. Secondly, the Hittite language of Anatolia, on which this commonness has been perceived, was a “minority” language, probably of the elites, whereas the basal language was non-Indo-European. This is hardly tenable with the concept of the Indo-Europeans having been the original inhabitants of this area. The Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture - Some Thoughts by Prof. B.B.Lal ( Director General (Retd.), Archaeological Survey of India
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