Anatolian hypothesis

"“All the migrations postulated by Renfrew ultimately stem from a single catalyst: the crossing of Anatolian farmers into Greece… For all practical purposes, Renfrew’s hypothesis disregards Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.”"

"In the 1990s, this view was briefly challenged by the British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who posited a Homeland in Anatolia. Thence, the IE-speaking tribes would have spread as early as about 7000 BCE, on the strength of their mastery of agriculture. This new development allowed for a fast population growth, as illustrated by the more recent spread of the Bantu languages throughout Africa along with agriculture. His merit was that he tied the spectacular expansion of IE to a powerful mechanism, the demographically useful new technology of agriculture. However, this theory has been widely rejected as linguistically untenable and archaeologically unsupported. The targeted studies that sought to decide between the Anatolian and the Russian Homeland have generally favoured the latter option."

"[The whole issue has been] simplified by Professor Renfrew to the ludicrous formula 7000 BCE Anatolia = farming Indo-Europeans."

"Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe ancestry down to the Bronze Age."

"What they do not state, however, is just how low are the proportions of Steppe ancestry in these cases. The “massive migrations” into Corded Ware northern Europe proved elusive elsewhere... 10% is no “massive migration” that might be expected to rewrite the language identity of central Anatolia (and western Anatolia, where these languages also dominated). More likely it left no major linguistic effect; the Anatolian branch remains better explained by stronger candidates."