Indo-European migrations

The Indo-European migrations were the migrations of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) speakers, as proposed by contemporary scholarship, and the subsequent migrations of people speaking further developed Indo-European languages, which explains why the Indo-European languages are spoken in a large area from India and Iran to Europe.

Quotes

• The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin, Sanskrit, French, Swedish, Persian, and so forth) or as the group of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens.
  • Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p.2

• Our knowledge of these migrations [that broke PIE unity] is very limited. On a linguistic basis, little can be said about them.
  • Beekes 1990:70., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• These Hindus are supposed to have entered the country from the northwest; they are conjectured by some to have brought with them the Brahmanical religion, and the language of the conquerors was probably the Sanscrit. On these three meagre data our philologists have worked ever since the Hindustani and its immense Sanscrit literature was forcibly brought into notice by Sir William Jones -- all the time with the three sons of Noah clinging around their necks. This is exact science, free from religious prejudices! Verily, ethnology would have been the gainer if this Noachian trio had been washed overboard and drowned before the ark reached land!
  • Helena Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled

• The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles’ migration of the tribes themselves.
  • I.M. Diakonov: “On the Original Home of the Speakers of Indo-European”, Journal of Indo-Europen Studies, 1-2/1985, p.153-154., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• But in the period 3100-2900 BC came a clear and dramatic infusion of Yamna [= Pontic] cultural practice, including burials, into Eastern Hungary and along the lower Danube. With this we are able to witness the beginnings of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe.
  • Fortson (2004:42-43) quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins. quoting Fortson, Benjamin, 2004: Indo-European Language and Culture. An Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford.

• Europeans today are a mixture of three very different ancestral populations: hunter-gatherers, first farmers, and a population with eastern affinities that was not yet present in Europe at the time of the first farmers. It was unclear when and how this eastern component arrived in Europe... ‘When we first looked at the new data, it was a Eureka moment’ ... ‘The eastern ancestry was present in every single sample starting at around 4,500 years ago, and absent in every single one before that time.’
  • Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. Nature, 2 March 2015 (doi:10.1038/nature14317). David Reich, Iosif Lazaridis et al., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.