Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.10

c14.10

The location of a possible Indo-European homeland, and the identification of the culture implied by the linguistic evidence with a comparable archaeological phenomenon, has been a matter of debate since the idea was first formulated in the last century. Nationalistic feeling has sometimes vitiated the quest in Europe, as when the German school headed by Kossina placed the original home of the Indo-Europeans in the North European plain, peopled with blond Nordics, while in India a love of the miraculous has led to such fantasies as a derivation of the Aryans from the North Pole six thousand years B.C. But responsible linguists and archaeologists have agreed in regarding the possible region of origin as relatively limited, and lying somewhere between the Danube and the Oxus. Giles, on linguistic grounds, looked to the Hungarian plains as a possible area for the evolution of the earliest Indo-European speech, while others have suggested Central Asia. Much play has been made of the significance of certain words (such as that for a beech-tree) in limiting down the possible area by reason of its natural features, but the careless use of names of plants and animals among various peoples even today (the ‘robin’ in England and America are, after all, two totally different birds!) warns us of the danger of attaching too great an importance to such arguments.