Ygorcs
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There's still the problem of R1a and their satem. I find it hard to believe that R1a gradually "turned IE" as far north as the Urals simply because of the prestige of the language in the open steppe down south. I think R1a and R1b were neighbors somewhere east of the Caspian, with R1a up north around Aral, and R1b somewhere in Turkmenistan. Their languages must have been close or the same. R1a moved northwest round the Caspian and went satem. R1b went round the south Caspian with stops around Lake Van and/or the Kura valley, and picked Southwest-Asian and Caucasus admixture on the way. Shulaveri Shomu fits in well.
Whether some R1b went west as Hittites while or before the others crossed the Caucasus to the steppe, I have no idea. But it would certainly explain why IE hittites had no steppe vocab (for which I'll take your word).
There are too many overlapping innovations and/or archaisms that are shared between certain satem and certain centum languages, that is regardless of whether they were subject to that phonetic change or not, to sustain the hypothesis that they had broken up and become distant from each other so early. I think the satem development was simply an areal feature that caught on in some adjacent areas and not in other areas. We can't be sure that it meant anything deeper than that, especially because, apart from the centum x satem distinction, there are several other distinctions between different IE branches that cross that binary boundary, what suggests that the centum and satem were both near the same source area. Probably only the Anatolian branch diverged so early that it can be really said to be very distinctive from all the others, especially in grammar, which is a part of the language that takes more time to change significantly (sound changes, even profound ones, can happen in less than 200 years, e.g. the Great Vowel Shift of English).