Riverman: Everything you are hypothesizing is just that, an Hypothesis. Again, you don't like the fact that the Anatolian branch of IE has been dated to at least 4200 BC (Prof. Anthony) and Hittite is the oldest of the Anatolian Branches.
Even if its that old, nobody can prove it was in Anatolia by 4.000 BC, but only that it might have existed by that time, in any other place, most likely the Western steppe.
You move the Pre-Anatolian split to 4000 BC you still can't reconcile it with Corded Ware civilization since that does not appear to about 3000 BC, even if it developed from an earlier culture, the Yamnaya civilization dates to only back to 3300 BC. So while Yamnaya and Corded Ware overlapped and likely were influenced by each other via trade etc. You still have a 700 year gap using your 4000 BC state as the start of the Anatolian IE branch.
Corded decorated pottery groups is not the same as "Corded Ware" in the sense of a specific cultural formation. These are Western steppe groups, predecessors not just of Corded Ware, but also of other steppe groups, primarily Cernavoda and other dead ends as well as later branches like Cotofeni and Usatovo among others.
In any case, its Cernavoda and related groups in the Balkans you have to look at, not Central-Eastern European Corded Ware in the narrower sense.
Corded decorated pottery and zoomorphic scepters being an earlier and more Balkan moving Western steppe element from the sphere of Sredny Stog. Central-Eastern European Corded Ware being a different branch from the same tree.
Whatever scenario you posit and alternative one can be put forth. A Proto-IE homeland in Armenia/Northern Iran can in terms of economy easily explain a move of IE to Anatolia, a language dispersal of IE with minimal to no genetic turnover in Bronze Age Anatolia. The two areas were trading and sharing technology (farming) since the Neolithic with little Genetic turnover in Neolithic Anatolia (e.g. Feldman et al 2019 as I cited earlier). The Reich abstract is indicating that even into the Bronze Age, there was still no genetic turnover in Anatolia.
Proto-Anatolians is just one branch, easy to explain from the Balkan Cernavoda related groups, But all the other IE have a direct descendency from Sredny Stog by and large, and those don't have younger Anatolian influences of significance after hte Lower-Middle Don cultures which directly precede Sredny Stog (and Khvalynsk).
You may be correct some early Steppe tribe came into Anatolia but you are going to have find DNA samples that support it. As of now, we have an Anatolian IE branch with no Steppe ancestry.
They just need to follow the Cernavoda trail.
Absent Steppe ancestry in the period when the Anatolian IE branch first developed, the best explanation to me is the language was dispersed into Anatolia from Armenia/Northern Iran.
The problem with this is that the great majority of IE/all LPIE being from the steppe and they have no such influence of significance.
So in my opinion, not having Steppe admixture into Anatolia at the time of the Anatolian IE branch first appeared
It first appeared when it was written down, we have actual Anatolian speakers in the record. Before that, there is no evidence for an IE presence in Anatolia and in all regions they lived we rather have evidence of preceding and nearby non-IE speakers, which can't be said for the steppe, by the way. Look at the gap between your proposed branching event (4.000 BC) and the first recorded Anatolian language evidence. A lot can happen in more than thousand years.
We are talking about 2.000 years of migrations, fusions, mixtures between the steppe and Anatolia. We just need to have steppe people nearby, which won't be a problem. But even the Cernavoda samples might be highly mixed and only have little steppe, but their migration and sheer existence being clearly steppe induced.
could be reconciled to your views/theory, if DNA can document some EHG into the South Caucuses just before/concurrently with the development of the Anatolian IE branch. From there, a dispersal of the early IE that lead to the Anatolian Branch would not in my review require any Steppe admixture into Bronze Age Anatolia (circa 4200 BC) because as we have seen and as I noted before, the language could have been adopted in Anatolia via trade contacts with IE speaking peoples in the Southern Caucus region. Evidence already suggest that the Hittite language used writing methods they got from Mesopotamia so there clearly was interaction between Anatolia and the Northern Iran, Armenia ancient Iraq (Mesopotamia) not only in the Neolithic period but well into the Bronze age.[/QUOTE]