Rizla
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According to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, the Anatolian languages may have split off a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages. It's likely that the ancient Hittites already spoke a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language prior to the time of Yamnaya culture and Yamnaya steppe herders were not responsible for the diffusion of IE languages to Anatolia. Tocharian has the perfect wagon vocabulary but some key words are missing in Indo-Hittite, which preserves archaism lost in other IE languages. Probably the ancient Hittites didn't develop the wagon vocabulary because they stayed behind unlike Tocharians who migrated to the Tarim Basin in western China.
"Proponents of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis claim the separation may have preceded the spread of the remaining branches by several millennia, possibly as early as 7000 BC. In this context, the proto-language before the split of Anatolian would be called Proto-Indo-Hittite, and the proto-language of the remaining branches, before the next split, presumably of Tocharian, would be called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). This is a matter of terminology, though, as the hypothesis does not dispute the ultimate genetic relation of Anatolian with Indo-European; it just means to emphasize the assumed magnitude of temporal separation.
According to Craig Melchert, the current tendency is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European evolved, and that the "prehistoric speakers" of Anatolian became isolated "from the rest of the PIE speech community, so as not to share in some common innovations."[1] Hittite, as well as its Anatolian cousins, split off from Proto-Indo-European at an early stage, thereby preserving archaisms that were later lost in the other Indo-European languages.[2]"
Just my thoughts. I was going to say something similar to this. Haven't linguists always been in disagreement about wether anatolian was derived from PIE, or if it was rather a sister to PIE? It makes sense to me, that the anatolian languages would have split off earlier from a pre-proto-indo-european or indo-hittite language, maybe spoken in the Caucasus. It's a good question which culture these people came from, as Epoch asks. But I think we need to remember that we are trying to solve a puzzle here, with half the pieces missing. I'm sure there's been lots of peoples, cultures and tribes through history we haven't found any trace of yet.
Considering that the reason PIE spread so far across Eurasia, was that the people of the yamnaya horizon were the first to combine horseriding with a pastoralist and nomadic lifestyle, it always occured odd to me, that some of them for unknown reasons would go through the balkans to stay in Anatolia, when they could have gone any were else.
I don't understand the people all over the internet crying that "the steppe theory is dead", scolding Willerslev and Damgaard for not abandoning a theory, that has loads of evidence for it in many different scientific fields, because of some flimsy and circumstantial evidence. I think they are too proffesional to jump at conclusions. They leave that to the laypeople who dream of their particular ancestors, and their particular ancient Y-chromosomal line, being the indo-european conquerors of Eurasia. lol.
The hittites left loads of writting in cuneiform, and one thing that is clear from these tablets is, that according to the hittites themselves, they were invaders that came from somewere else - and to be honest, the possibilities are kind of limited.
On the topic of the tocharians, or rather the earliest Tarim mummies, I don't think its' been completely settled were they came from. What I got from reading "The Tarim Mummies" by Mallory and Mair, was that the first IE people in the Tarim basin can't have come straight from the steppe, since they knew irrigation farming. They must have learned that somewere.