Mariya Ivanova in her study of the pre-historic cultures around the Black Sea stresses that the technology from the Chalcolithic onward tended to spread across what she calls the 'Royal Road' - a corridor connecting the Near Eastern highlands, Anatolia and the Balkans, terminating in the Carpathian Basin. The grasslands north of the Caucasus on the other hand weren't very well suited to the spread of innovation due to their low effective population density and the lack of discernible social organization, the Royal Road thus being the most immediate vector for the dispersal of technology into Europe.
My hypothesis that there was a separate migration emanating out of the Taurus-Zagros range or the surrounding areas (which comprises most hotbeds of human innovation from the Chalcolithic until historic times) into south-eastern Europe, causing the somewhat elevated affinity to the Iran-Caucasus populations found in the Balkans, the Aegean and parts of Italy today. Indeed, the sudden appearances of the various deliberately produced bronze alloys in the European Mediterranean and the hypothetical concomitant migrations could have already had a enough of an impact to cause a substantial shift to the Near East before the onset of the Iron Age.
Ivanova believes that the emergence of the Baden complex, for example, was one the results of these impetuses from the Near East. Recently specialists alluded to similar affinities of the early Baden culture and see the Bulgarian Yunatsite and Ezero cultures as early entry points into Europe from West Asia [source: Lolita Nikolova. Balkan-Anatolian Cultural Horizons from the Fourth Millennium BC and Their Relations to the Baden Cultural Complex].
Irrespective of the precise nature of these migrations, Ivanova's "The Black Sea and the Early Civilizations of Europe, the Near East, and Asia" is a rare gem and the processes she describes might be key for understanding the peopling of southern Europe.
