The North European hypothesis is a linguistic and archaeological theory that tries to explain the spread of the Indo-European languages in Europe and parts of Asia by locating the original homeland (Urheimat) in southern Scandinavia or in the North German Plain. This hypothesis, advanced by Karl Penka, Hermann Hirt, Gustaf Kossinna and others, had some success in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. However, given its association with Nazism, and even more decisively given the subsequent rise of the Kurgan hypothesis (developed out of the more general steppe hypothesis of the 19th century), it is now a fringe theory only supported by a minority of scholars, typically in a variant known as the Neolithic creolisation hypothesis.
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👉 North European hypothesis in the context of Proto-Indo-European homeland
The Proto-Indo-European homeland was the prehistoric homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), meaning it was the region where the proto-language was spoken before it split into the dialects from which the earliest Indo-European language later evolved.
The most widely accepted proposal about the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland was called the steppe hypothesis. It puts the archaic, early, and late PIE homeland in the Pontic–Caspian steppe around 4000 BCE. A notable second possibility, which has gained renewed attention during the 2010s and 2020s due to aDNA research, is the Armenian hypothesis, which situates the homeland for archaic PIE ('Indo-Hittite') south of the Caucasus mountains. A third contender is the Anatolian hypothesis, which puts it in Anatolia c. 8000 BCE. Several other explanations have been proposed, including the outdated but historically prominent North European hypothesis, the Neolithic creolisation hypothesis, the Paleolithic continuity paradigm, the Arctic theory, and the "indigenous Aryans" (or "out of India") hypothesis. These are not widely accepted, and are considered to be fringe theories.