Proto-Indo-European society is the reconstructed culture of Proto-Indo-Europeans, the ancient speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, ancestor of all modern Indo-European languages. Historical linguistics combined with archaeological and genetic evidence have provided the current basis for understanding the culture and its people. The most widely accepted theory suggests that the culture emerged on the Pontic-Caspian steppe after 5000 BCE, a period known as the Chalcolithic where smelted copper and stone tools were in use simultaneously. Proto-Indo-European speakers are considered to have been semi-nomadic, but domestication of cattle, first for ritual sacrifice and later for consumption, dairy production, and cereal cultivation emerged as the culture shifted from herding and hunter-gatherer to farming. The social hierarchy included an upper class of priests, warriors and tribe chiefs, and a lower class of commoners and slaves; patrilineality and patriarchy characteristics have been well-established. Trade, bolstered by access to wheeled wagons, connected Proto-Indo-European culture to others with archaeological and linguistic evidence supporting relations with Proto-Uralic peoples, Uruk, and Old European cultures.
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đ Proto-Indo-European culture in the context of Proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European has been discovered; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result.
PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from approximately 4500Â BCE to 2500Â BCE during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the PonticâCaspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoral culture and patriarchal religion of its speakers. As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through the Indo-European migrations, the regional dialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (the Indo-European sound laws), morphology, and vocabulary. Over many centuries, these dialects transformed into the known ancient Indo-European languages. From there, further linguistic divergence led to the evolution of their current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages.