Anatolian hypothesis

The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis, or steppe theory, which enjoys more academic favor. The Anatolian hypothesis suggests that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Anatolia during the Neolithic era. It associates the distribution of historical Indo-European languages with the expansion during the Neolithic Revolution of the 7th and the 6th millennia BC. The hypothesis states that Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully, by demic diffusion, into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BC with the Neolithic advance of farming (wave of advance). Accordingly, most inhabitants of Neolithic Europe would have spoken Indo-European languages, and later migrations would have replaced the Indo-European varieties with other Indo-European varieties. The expansion of agriculture from the Middle East would have diffused three language families: Indo-European languages toward Europe, Dravidian languages toward Pakistan and India, and Afroasiatic languages toward the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Reacting to criticism, Renfrew revised his proposal to the effect of taking a pronounced Indo-Hittite position. Renfrew's revised views place only Pre-Proto-Indo-European in the 7th millennium BC in Anatolia, proposing as the homeland of Proto-Indo-European proper the Balkans around 5000 BC, which he explicitly identified as the "Old European culture", proposed by Marija Gimbutas. He thus still locates the original source of the Indo-European languages in Anatolia around 7000 BC. Reconstructions of a Bronze Age PIE society, based on vocabulary items like "wheel", do not necessarily hold for the Anatolian branch, which may have separated at an early stage, prior to the invention of wheeled vehicles.