> irrefutable I'm not sure I'd go quite that strongly. The Horse, The Wheel, and Language is a good book (IMO) and while from 2007 still reflects the general

> irrefutable I'm not sure I'd go quite that strongly. The Horse, The Wheel, and Language is a good book (IMO) and while from 2007 still reflects the general consensus, as I understand it. The author refers to it as the Kurgan hypothesis throughout for a reason. He even interviews Marija Gimbutas, the idiosyncratic former Soviet archaeologist who championed the steppe origin back when it was not the prevailing opinion. She was quite certain of a steppe origin, but she freely admits the various small inconsistencies and flaws. I suggest the book, because it really emphasizes that genetics and archaeology tell us very little about a people's culture, or their language. It's extremely precarious to say, well, these two peoples made extremely similar pottery, and buried their dead in a similar way, so they must have spoken a related language. It's similarly precarious to say, well, these two people are closely related by descent, so they must have spoken a related language. One of the methods through which the Indo-European languages may have spread so far, a hypothesis advanced in the book, involves agriculturalist neolithic non-Indo-Europeans (both in material culture and genetically) adopting the prestige language of their Indo-European pastoralist masters, without extensive intermarriage or necessarily adopting the entire material culture. (Language change, without accompanying genetic change, is probably greatly underappreciated as a dynamic. Vast swaths of North America are inhabited by English speakers who have no ancestry that traces back to Britain. Similar effects have surely happened before.)