"A handful of scholars try for the more ambitious option, viz. identifying a common origin of Chinese and IE, a kind of “Sino-European” stage in linguistic development from which Chinese and IE went their separate ways. Pulleyblank (1993:106-107) upholds “the possibility of a genetic connection between Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European” all while admitting that it is “inconsistent with a European or Anatolian homeland for the Indo-Europeans but it is much less so with the Kurgan theory”, esp. considering that the Kurgan (“grave-hill”) culture of the steppe “was not the result of local evolution in that region but had its source in an intrusion from an earlier culture farther east”. But his and other tentative hypotheses of a deep kinship of Chinese with Indo-European, as also with North-Caucasian and Austronesian, have been refuted in sufficient measure by Vovin (1997) and will not detain us here. Of course at a time depth of Nostratic or whichever prehistoric kinship, many connections can be thought up, but to the same extent, geographical movements of populations may have taken place over the same millennia. Therefore, even plausible or proven linguistic connections at such time-depth cannot decide the geographical land of origin that interests us here."