history of Europe The Indo-Europeans

When there is evidence for the languages spoken in Europe at the end of the prehistoric period, it is clear that with few exceptions, such as Basque or Etruscan, they belonged to the Indo-European language group, which also extended to India and Central Asia. This raises the question of when these languages, or their ancestral prototype, were first spoken in Europe. One theory links these languages with a particular population of Indo-Europeans and explains the expansion of the languages as the result of invasion or immigration; their origin is sought in the east, perhaps in the area north of the Black and Caspian seas. The invasion is associated with the new patterns of settlement, economy, material culture, burial, and social organization seen about 3000 bc. These innovations, however, may be better attributed to internal developments. An alternative explanation for the origin of Indo-European languages associates it with the immigration of the first farmers from Anatolia at the beginning of the Neolithic Period, but the spread of farming does not seem to have been a uniform process or to have been achieved everywhere by population migration. There is, however, no single archaeological pattern that might correspond to a migration on an appropriate geographic scale throughout Europe, and all these explanations raise fundamental questions about the development, spread, and adoption of languages, the relationship of language to ethnic groups, and the correspondence of archaeologically recognizable patterns of material culture to either language or ethnicity.