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I've been musing about your question as I've gone about my day.
I don't know where you're getting that "we often link Western Civilization with IE-speaking peoples".
Who is the "We" in that sentence? When I was in university, and a good one if I may say so, the Indo-Europeans were barely mentioned in the year long required Western Civilization course. As a major in European history they were barely mentioned in the other courses I took too, usually only in reference to language and the sky gods etc.
It was very much a niche subject, very much relegated to "anthropology" courses, where it was already in very bad odor as a relic of racist 19th century anthropologists and Nazism.
The emphasis was indeed on the invention of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, the division of labor, city states, writing, the Babylonian Empire, jump to the Greek City States and Greek culture, and then Rome.
Even today, in the courses which still remain, you can see the Indo-Europeans are conspicuous by their absence.
This is just the first syllabus which popped up.
https://sasn.rutgers.edu/sites/defa...-files/Western Civ 1 syllabus fall 2021_0.pdf
The first mention of them I heard was through a psychology class which assigned a paper by Cavalli-Sforza on in-breeding. The professor happened to be a believer in genetics as an element in IQ. (He'd be fired now!) I went on to read other papers Cavalli-Sforza had written and fell down the rabbit hole. I then took a course in Greek mythology, read Frazier, Marija Gimbutas, and so on.
If people pick up their European history from discussions on anthrofora, they can get a very warped view of how it was taught and the conclusions which were drawn. So far as I was taught and knew: "ex oriente lux", or light comes from the east. Other, as I said, than for language and religion, "Western Civilization" was formed by the absorption of the advancements which first took place in the Near East, and later on in Greece and Rome.
I will acknowledge that once you know the signs to look for, there are Indo-European elements to ancient Greek culture, for example in the glorification of the warrior and the horse, and in the religion, but that was not something which was ever taught in Western Civ classes. To the best of my recollection it wasn't even taught in Greek history classes. You had to take specific courses on Bronze Age Europe perhaps. I honestly don't know.
Prior to the Indo-European invasions, there was no concept of "Europe" so to speak. They were the unifying force that contributed to this notion of Western Civilization. We often speak of these Mesolithic/Neolithic groups in terms of genetics, but they likely didn't see themselves as such. Languages such as Basque, Etruscan, Minoan, etc... even if they go back to a unified EEF-language, were so different that they were essentially unrecognizable from one another, not just to the average person, but to linguists.
Before cultural hegemony is established, oftentimes there is a period of struggle in which similarly cultured people fight with one another. Examples include the Warring States period in China that led to the Qin dynasty hegemony, Ancient Greek states fighting for hegemony until Alexander's ascension and the development of the Koine Greek language and Hellenistic period. Or the wars that took place in Western Europe from the Renaissance to the end of WW2 when America established hegemony.
The history of Europe is essentially the struggle of patriarchal, IE-speaking, horse riding, bronze/iron weapon using, peoples fighting each other until Julius Caesar unified Western Celtic Europe culturally, while Alexander did so with the Eastern Mediterranean. This created the Greek East/Latin West flanks of the multi-ethnic Roman Empire.