New Indo-European expansion maps

There is one major, major flaw to these maps; the association of the Maykop culture with the Anatolian languages, which is almost certainly incorrect.  That idea was already archaeologically unlikely, but now genetic evidence further tears the rug out from under it; there is almost no Y-DNA haplogroup sharing between the Maykop and steppe populations. Curiously, the maternal DNA evidence suggests that outmarriage of women wasn't completely unknown, and of course, archaeology has long suggested that there were significant trade between the two populations as well as probable cultural diffusion of some cultural elements (including kurgan burials, possibly some element of social stratification, bronze metallurgy, etc.); I had thought maybe that some element of Maykop elite dominance from Maykop accounted for the CHG element in the Yamnaya population.  But it looks like genetics has told me no.  In any case, in neither of those scenarios is Maykop an Anatolian expansion of Indo-European from the steppes.  So, ignore that label, and otherwise check out these pretty cool maps which are very suggestive of the para-historic expansion of various branches of Indo-European.

What did the Maykop people speak?  Who knows?  A number of language groups in the Caucasus have arrived historically from elsewhere (Armenian, Ossetian, various Turkish languages, etc.)  If the nearby Kura-Araxes culture was Hurrian (as a linguistic family, not necessarily a specific language) that's a possibility.  Looking at the linguistic situation in Papua, it's obvious that entire language families can lurk in isolated mountain valleys to possibly spread later, so the languages that appear to be native to the region can easily lurk out there in prehistory without needing archaeological visibility.

Not only that, the Maykop culture was really north of the mountains, not in the mountains anyway.

Again; Maykop should not be labelled Proto-Anatolian, which should instead be the Suvarovo cultures to the immediate west of the Yamnaya on the western shores of the Black Sea.  Note also the early separation of the proto-Tocharians.

Usatovo, baby!  The first spread of Indo-Europeans (as opposed to Indo-Hittites, which is maybe just a semantic quibble) over much of the territory of the Suvorovo culture.  Anatolian languages should probably by now have spread to the very southernmost Balkan area, and possibly even across the straights of Marmara into northwestern Anatolia.

Here, an isogloss and the earliest, most primitive proto-languages of the Indo-European "stocks" is put tentatively on the map.  For people like me, who are of primarily Anglo-Scottish ancestry, it's interesting to see that the Usatovo culture is here presented as splitting into a northern and southern group, Italo-Celtic developing (eventually) out of the southern dialects and Germanic out of the northern dialects.  Both are, of course, important to the development of me personally.

The same map again, but this time highlighting a different linguistic isogloss.

Yet another isogloss mapped to the map.  It's curious because what this shows is that while separating, these peoples and dialects were still in some form of contact, because shared isogloss bundles were not necessarily limited to one branching early dialect.  This particular isogloss is satemization, by the way, which probably doesn't justify the amount of ink spilled on it, because it's not necessarily more important than the other isoglosses highlighted so far.

Another isogloss on the same map.

The final isogloss mapped on the same map, again showing how the various dialects split and yet also interacted with each other.

Finally, we get additional expansions and advance the map forward in time.

Finally, the Corded Ware horizon appears.  Curiously, no identity is assigned to it, except in the Fatyanova variant, and the Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic areas are unmoved (whereas Proto-Greek either goes through the Proto-Germanic, or around them by crossing the sea.  Of all of these, this seems perhaps the most handwavy and inherently unlikely, at least in terms of where the labels still fall.  Nobody really has any idea where those ancestral proto-stocks were spoken.  If by some chance this map is right, it also could suggest that the vast majority of the Corded Ware horizon spoke some form of Indo-European that is anonymous and possibly no longer even extant; kind of the Nordwestblock hypothesis writ even more large. (Or perhaps it's meant to indicate that those were the regions from which Corded Ware allegedly spread?)

The next big expansion after the Corded Ware is the Andronovo, shown here.  Now we've got Anatolian languages in place (although the Maykop territory is still red, ignoring that it's obviously where the unrelated Georgian and other Kartvelian languages were attested in the first appearance of written history), Thracian comes ex nihilo from somewhere, and Greeks have conquered Greece.  Even if the Usatovo locations of Proto-Germanic is accurate, it's extremely unlikely that they're still there, so I'm not sure why it's still labeled as such.

Mysteriously the Proto-Germanic label has migrated, Indic and Persian (the latter being too specific of a label to be accurate) are now showing, although the Indic superstrate over Hurrian Mitanni is not shown (maybe it's a little too early), Greek is shown now in North Africa, which is also almost certainly correct; I don't know of any reason to believe that they settled that area until after the Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Ages, nearly a millennium later.  Also, neither Crete nor Cyprus should be Greek yet, unless we're talking about the very late second millennium, nearing the Bronze Age collapse itself (and even then, it's doubtful that Greek actually replaced the languages of those cultures, especially Cyprus.

Still; even if some of the labels are questionable, the maps themselves are quite valuable and the early ones are even quite informative.