Kurgan

"Which components of the reconstructed Indo-European proto-culture can be used as evidence of a steppic location?... two arguments are generally singled out by the proponents of the steppic theory: the case of the horse and that of the chariot. The domesticated horse, on the one hand, and the chariot on the other, are supposedly well-attested in the shared vocabulary and are particularly valorized in the earliest Indo-European mythologies, where the sacrifice of a horse is the ultimate royal sacrifice... The most common root for the horse is certainly found in a significant number of Indo-European languages... Its absence in Slavic is all the more surprising since the historical “cradle” of the Slavs is often said to be located in the North Pontic Steppes, or close by, precisely where the earliest domestication of the horse is reputed to have occurred."

"“Gimbutas, following most recent Russian work, has departed from Childe, to the extent of deriving the Kurgan cultures from the steppes on the Lower Volga and farther east (…) While linguistic opinion has been moving in the direction of putting the Indo-European homeland in the region of the Vistula, Oder or Elbe, archaeological opinion is now putting it in the Lower Volga steppe and regions east of the Caspian Sea.”"

"“Local evolution cannot account for such abrupt changes (…) The pottery is relatable to the earliest Neolithic in the Middle Urals and Soviet Central Asia.”"

"Russian scholar N. Merpert traces the Kurgan culture to the “Volga-Ural region, developing there under the influence of Neolithic cultures of the south-east Caspian zone”."

"The willingness... to see even 10% ancestry as if a good case for a language spread is reminiscent of their interpretations in the cases of Mycenaean Greek and South Asia. In both cases their own ancient DNA analyses support no “massive” migration of people of Steppe origin. On the contrary, overall percentages are generally very low, and in South Asia also too late for a plausible first arrival of Indic languages here (let alone Indo-Iranic as a whole). But however small and late, and however implausible that they replaced all languages from Iran right across to northern India, that is what has to be claimed for these weak signals, for the Steppe hypothesis to be right. ...the cat is out of the bag: not all Indo-European goes back to the Steppe. Now freed from the Steppe hypothesis as the base presumption (or aspiration) for interpreting aDNA data, we can look forward to a neutral re-evaluation of the most plausible candidates for tracing multiple other branches of the Indo-European family out of the original Caucasus/Zagros homeland, without all having to travel via the Steppe."