32. The home of Indo-Europeans.

There several opinions regarding where from the dispersal began. 1) Scandinavia, and the adjacent parts of Northern Germany, and it was often linked with a belief that the Germanic peoples were the ‘original’ Indo-Europeans; b) steppes of Ukraine, north of the Black sea; c) eastern Anatolia, to the South of the Caucasus range, and west of the Caspian sea.

Let us assume that it was the Ukrainian steppes or South Russian steppes, where about 5^th millennium BC, lived people, who formed a loosely linked group of communities with common gods and similar social organization. After 4000 BC, when the language had developed into a number of dialects, they began to expand in various directions, different groups ending up in Iran, India, the Mediterranean area, and most part of Europe. In the course of their expansion, the Indo-Europeans overran countries which had reached a higher level of civilization than they had themselves, the Aryas, for example, conquered the civilizations of Northern India, and the Persians those of Mesopotamia. Primitive nomadic peoples have overrun more advanced urban civilizations, and there is no need to postulate some special intellectual or physical prowess in the Indo-Europeans.

There is one technical factor, which played a role in the expansion of Indo-Europeans. This was the use of horse-drawn vehicles, which was characteristic of Indo-European society. The horse was a later introduction into the river valleys of the great early urban civilizations, in which the normal draught animal was the ass, and when the horse came to them, it came from the North. It is possible that Indo-Europeans were ahead of time, and it was their use of wheeled vehicles, especially the fast horse-drawn chariot, that enabled them to overrun such a large part of the Eurasian continent.

33. Kentum and Satem lang-es.

The first division into an Eastern Group and a Western Group is important. The groups are marked by a number of differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, which suggests that there was an early division of the Indo-Europeans into two main areas, perhaps representing migrations in different directions. One of the distinctive differences in phonology between the two groups is the treatment of the PIE palatal k, which appears as a velar [k] in the western languages, but as some kind of palatal fricative, [s] or [ ] in the Eastern languages. Thus the word for hundred is Greek he-katon, Latin centum, Tocharian känt, Old Irish cet, and Welsh cant (the c in each case representing [k]), but in Sanskrit it is satam, in Old Slavonic seto (modern Ukrainian cто). For this reason, the two groups are often referred to as the Kentum languages and the Satem languages. On the whole, the Kentum languages are in the West and the Satem languages in the East, but an apparent anomaly is Tocharian, right across in western China, which is a Kentum language. The division into Kentum and Satem languages took place around 1500 BC.