The following is based on an article published in 2012.
Most linguists believe proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of all Indo-European
languages, was the language of chariot-driving pastoralists who spread through
Eurasia from steppes north of the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago. But a
competing theory is that proto-Indo-European was spoken by farmers in Anatolia
(Asia Minor) about 9,000 years ago, and spread from there along with agriculture.
To evaluate these hypotheses, researchers statistically compared IndoEuropean languages’ vocabularies. Languages with more similar vocabularies are
probably more closely related, sharing more recent common ancestors.
Combining the vocabulary statistics with the known dates when certain languages
split, and with their known geographical ranges, a computer calculated the most
likely relationships among all Indo-European languages and concluded that protoIndo-European probably originated in Anatolia 9,000 years ago.
Disputing this conclusion, skeptics argue that most Indo-European languages
are similar in their words pertaining to chariots and wagons, suggesting protoIndo-European split into daughter languages only after chariots and wagons were
invented. No archaeological evidence indicates that chariots and wagons existed
before 5,500 years ago. Furthermore, proto-Indo-European had words for "horse"
and "bee" and lent many words to proto-Uralic, the mother language of Finnish
and Hungarian. The steppes north of the Black Sea were far closer than Anatolia
to areas where proto-Uralic was spoken, and had more abundant wild horses and
bees.
