In this article, we will pay attention to the Indo-Europeans - the historical roots of the Slavs, as well as the ancestors of other peoples, who, presumably, originated from the territory of the north of the Black Sea and the interfluve of the Volga and Dnieper. Here we will consider questions about their origin, the introduction of the term into speech circulation, the affiliation of ancient tribes to modern states, and much more.
Acquaintance with Indo-Europeans
Indo-Europeans are native speakers of Indo-European languages. As a noun and an adjective, this word began to be used in the ethnographic and ethnolinguistic literature of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At present, Slavs, Germans, Greeks, Thracians, etc. are referred to the Indo-Europeans. For a long time the word was not used in speech, because it led to confusion based on the presence of modern people of European nationality - such as Portuguese, British, etc. but born or living since childhood in the countries of the Indian subcontinent or on the Indochinese peninsula and nearby islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This is also due to the fact that these territories were colonies of the major powers of Europe.
Post-war decisions
The historical roots of the Indo-Europeans penetrate incredibly far into the depths of time. The concept of "Indo-Europeans" in the period from the beginning to the half of the twentieth century had a limited range of application in any literature, academic and journalistic. The Second World War, which began in 1939, enabled this term to enter the scientific circulation. This was due to the need to change early terms, such as the “Aryan tribe” or “Aryan people,” and the discredited frequent use by the followers of the Nazi Reich, to argue the logic of the set of provisions in the doctrine. Until 1950, the concept was still little used. The expression was introduced into the academic circle by Arnold Toynbee.
Balts and Germanic peoples
Consider which peoples can consider themselves descendants of the Indo-Europeans.
In accordance with the place of residence of the ancient communities of nomadic tribes, it can be said that the representatives of modern Latvians and Lithuanians are Balts, and they also include assimilated subjects of the Prussians, Latgals, Yatvingians, Curonian, etc.
The German people of modernity are represented by Austrians, British, Danes, Dutch, Icelanders, Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Frisians and merged Goths, Vandals and other ancient Germanic tribes.
Indo-Aryan people include Hindustanis, Bengalis, Rajasthans and probably Meots, Tauris and Sinds.
Information about Iranians, Italics and Greeks
The roots of the Indo-Europeans can be traced to Iranian origin, which includes Persians, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Tats, Talysh, lambs, Dards, Obts, Pamir peoples and assimilated Tokhars, Ephthalites, Scythians, Saki, Sarmatians, Cimmerians, etc.
Anatolian peoples include the Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, Lycian, Palai, Carian and other tribes, as well as the Armenians.
Italians are made up of Oscans, Umbra, Pitsenov, Sabines, Falisks, eqvs, Vestins, Sikuls, Lusitans, Venets, Samnites and some other nationalities.
The Greeks were close to the material culture belonging to the Phrygians and Macedonians.
Examining the people of the ancient Celts, it can be determined that they include representatives of the Scots, Irish, Bretons, Welsh, as well as the merged Gauls, Galatians and Galvets.
From Slavs to Thracians
The historical roots of the Slavs are Indo-Europeans. These include the modern representatives of Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, part of the peoples inhabiting Russia, as well as Serbs, Poles, Luzhans, Slovenes, Ukrainians, Czechs, and Croats. Currently, the roots of the Slavs are Indo-Europeans, tribes who lived and wandered through the territories of many countries, for example Ukraine or Russia.
Illyrian descendants are most likely represented by Albanians, Romanians and Moldavians.
All of the above-mentioned peoples of these three paragraphs of the article belong to a different type of European race. According to one of the theories supported by the linguist of Russia and the USSR S. Starostin, the Indo-European set of languages must be classified as nostratic languages.
Ancient Indo-Europeans
There are Asian and European models that determine the origin of the Indo-Europeans. Among European, the most common is the mound hypothesis, which is recognized by most archaeologists and linguists. They try to prove the hypothesis to us that the territories lying within the Northern Black Sea region, as well as the lands between the Volga and Dnieper rivers, were the ancestral home of the Indo-European peoples. Initially, semi-nomadic communities inhabiting the territory of the modern east of Ukraine and the southern parts of Russia lived there from V to IV millennium BC. e. Indo-Europeans - a population characterized by Samara, Srednestogovskoy and pit cultures.
After the development by people living in these areas of technology for melting from bronze and domestication of horses, the tribes began to migrate in a large number of directions. This led to a sharp difference in racial and anthropological type between representatives of modern Europe.
The era of the great geographical discoveries allowed the Indo-European languages to migrate to America, South Africa, Australia, etc., due to extensive colonization.
Root origin hypotheses
The Anatolian hypothesis is one of the alternative ways to describe the origin of the Indo-Europeans.
Another situation dictates that the ancestral home of this people is localized in Turkey, previously Anatolia.
The hypothesis put forward in 1987 about the location of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans claims that it is concentrated in the territory of the Chatal-Hyuk settlement. Assuming this was Briton Colin Renfrew.
They tried to position the Anatolian hypothesis as a glottochronological study. This statement was published in 2003, and the publisher was Nature magazine.
The Armenian hypothesis, an analogue of the Anatolian one, believes that probably the Indo-European language appeared on the territory of the Armenian Highlands.
Due to the fact that Indo-Europeans are tribes that began their history from a precisely unknown place, other hypotheses currently exist. Another such assumption is the Balkan hypothesis, which suggested that pra-Indo-European speech arose in the vastness of the Balkan Peninsula and was, initially, within the framework of the existing list of cultures of the Balkan Neolithic era.
In the early Neolithic, approximately 5000 years. BC e., there was a thin border between the zones of contact of the languages of the Indo-Europeans and representatives of the Uralic, North Caucasian speech. This information generates another hypothesis that postulates this assumption, operating with a number of linguistic models. The archaeological point of view believes, due to the uniformity of cultural development of the manufacture of linear ribbon ceramics, that this may be sufficient reason to put forward a new hypothesis.
This hypothesis finds its supporters among the group of people who are supporters of the "center of gravity" - the principle that the central point of dispersion of oral speech is in the area where a variety of languages was noted at the highest level. This is also argued that the peripheral region has a high percentage of uniformity. This principle was noted as a result of an attempt to determine the origin of a large number of language mixtures.
Regarding the problems affecting the location of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, this principle tries to show that the variance of linguistic units focused on the South-East of Europe.
Genetic marking
Indo-Europeans are a linguistic type community. Representatives of this nationality are not connected by anything other than speech. Markers of mtDNA and their distribution are weakly associated with the pathway of language distribution. Until 1960, evidence of an archaeological type indicated cultural changes that were constantly interpreted to confirm that the migration of peoples was very large. The data provided by the new archeology that arose between 1960 and 1970 refuted this assumption, which is due to the likelihood of inculcating a new culture, through trade, etc.
Some facts
It will be interesting to note that the Basques are the only people of Western Europe who speak a language that does not belong to the Indo-European group.
Another interesting fact is that the Hittite tribes and Luvians are considered the oldest people in the Middle East. The process of their separation began in the nineteenth century BC. e.
To summarize
Based on all of the above, we can conclude that modern Indo-Europeans do not have significant national kinship and are based only on the linguistic similarity of origin. The question of the origin of Indo-Europeans in the present tense remains open, since there are many hypotheses about their place of residence and the appearance of this nation, but these are only hypotheses. Now the reader can also appeal with data on the origin of various modern peoples.