While not exactly new, it's new to me, and a new issue of the Journal of Indo-European Studies is coming out that is devoted explicitly and almost exclusively to the discussion of this potential topic (there are a few other non-related articles at the end of the issue.) This is the Caucasian Substrate Hypothesis. Although I obviously can't read this, since it's not out yet, an earlier version of Bomhard's original proposal as well as a pre-print of David Anthony's response to it are available at Academia.edu.
Substrate hypotheses are very popular in Indo-European studies. I was briefly intrigued by Carlos Quiles and his Uralic Substrate Hypothesis, and while the whole general gist of that is untenable (Uralic languages almost certainly arrive later, and more from the East, along with uniparental markers associated with the Y-DNA clade N1a, or whatever they've updated the label to be most recently. But that doesn't mean that the baby need be thrown out with the bathwater; a plausible model (given an off-hand supporting comment in Anthony's paper referenced above) proposal is that what we know of as Late Proto-Indo-European (i.e., after the Anatolian group had already split off, and probably as the Tocharian group was splitting off) actually spread over the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe region to form the Yamnaya horizon from a more constrained area in the eastern portion of the steppes, more commonly associated with the Khvalynsk culture that was present there than with the Sredni Stog culture that was more to the West. The latter probably spoke relatively closely related sister language dialects, and genetically they were very similar, although the preponderance of R1a vs R1b was different from East to West. It is also possible that as Quiles asserts, the spread of the Yamnaya from the east not only absorbed much of the former Sredni Stog area, but also displaced them to the north and further west, where they became the core of the Corded Ware culture. However, unlike Quiles' assertion, there's no way that these Corded Ware people spoke Uralic; they probably spoke a very similar language to that of the Yamnaya from which they were largely derived and closely related. Some see in this archaeological and genetic distinction an early marker for the split between satem and centum languages, and this actually works fairly well as long as you assume that in parts of Europe (the Germanic-speaking parts in particular) you're willing to accept some handwaviness with regards to a putative substrate of satem speakers underneath a later arriving Unetice-based centum language... that seems genetically to be derived from a Corded ware derivative in the Netherlands called the Single-Grave culture, filtered through the confusing membrane of the Bell Beakers and showing significant ties with obviously satem-speaking Sintashta and other post-Corded Ware cultures further east.
Bomhard's proposal does seem to share a few high level details here; that pre-Indo-European was originally a "Euroasiatic" language related to Uralic (although the reasons for assuming so are handwavey at best) which was superimposed over a language related to the Kartvelian family. This Kartvelian-related substrate underneath a Uralic-related superstrate eventually became some level of archaic Proto-Indo-European, which then continued to evolve more or less in situ into the Late Proto-Indo-European which split into the daughter languages known today, but our ability to recover many details from prior to the late PIE frame is difficult other than to note similarities with Uralic, Kartvelian, and others. This may have happened so long ago, in fact, that it goes back to the fact that Yamnaya is, at a high level, about half and half Eastern Hunter Gatherer (EHG) ancestry and Caucasian Hunter Gatherer (CHG) ancestry (Eurasiatic superimposed over Caucasian?) with a hint of local Western Hunter Gatherer (WHG).
While I like many aspects of this idea, there are a few key things to keep in mind. Genetically, Yamnaya is closely related and clearly derived from populations that were already on the steppes for centuries and even millennia without any significant migration from elsewhere; groups such as Maykop, the "Steppe Maykop" and others contributed essentially nothing to the genetic picture of the those that followed. Neighbors such as Keltiminar or Botai to the East contributed little if anything (although were probably related to each other and perhaps the "Steppe Maykop") although neighbors to the west from the Cucuteni-Tripillyan complex seem to have had a more permeable relationship, and the Usatovo culture may well have been a hybrid of Yamnaya and Tripillyan. Nothing that would resemble the Siberian ancestry either linguistically or genetically appears anywhere other than the tenuous link that the EHG population seems to have distant connections to the Mal'ta Buret culture of 20,000 years ago—and yet, the same is not true for Uralic which seems to have a deep Siberian connection. Whatever migration into the steppes may have happened, it has to predate the formation of a distinct Yamnaya horizon by millennia, and connections to Uralic-speakers cannot be shown genetically or archaeologically. Most of the details are linguistic only, which significantly weakens it.
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