The future of Indo-European research

From Davidski's blog, here's some stuff that he's "in the know" about in the publishing pipeline. It's consistent with what he's been predicting for some time, but he expects the data that's the source of his confidence in those predictions to drop shortly. In fact, he expected most of it to drop in 2020, and blames the scamdemic for it's delay. Scamdemic being my label, not his. I don't know what he thinks about the Chinese coronavirus. Anyway, his specific predictions—paraphrased—with a little bit of commentary from me:

• The proto-Indo-European homeland will move westward. Rather than the Pontic-Caspian steppes, it will be the North Pontic steppes. The correllary here is that the Yamnaya culture will be seen as a probable close relative but linguistic (and ultimately, demic) dead-end. The origins of "classic" proto-Indo-European will be focused on the today somewhat nebulous transition from the Sredni Stog culture to the Corded Ware. What roles the more easterly earlier steppe cultures, like Khvalynsk and Samara, or even Repin for that matter, which is the immediate source of Yamnaya and probably Afanasievo, are not clear to me in this model, and will probably need to be rethought.
• In contrast, the search for the proto-Uralic homeland will migrate deeper north and east into Siberia. Because from a linguistic angle it's often been proposed that the proto-Uralic and proto-Indo-European may have been neighbors and may have influenced each other (or even been sister-languages deeper in time at the Eastern-Hunter-Gatherer time frame) this may also need to be rethought, or perhaps it will influence the models coming out. One must keep in mind that one line of evidence alone isn't sufficient to establish this stuff. Genetics and linguistics usually match; i.e., new language attestation usually accompanies a demic movement as well. But genes don't speak languages, and if genetic, archaeological and linguistic evidence aren't all aligned in any given model, that given model probably needs a little more work before it's ready for prime time.
• The key role of the Single Grave Culture, the westernmost variant of the Corded Ware, in the population of Western Europe will finally get the attention that it deserves. In addition, the R1b-L51 Y-DNA haplogroup, associated clearly with the Bell Beaker expansion across Western Europe will be seen as a key Single Grave marker; a minority haplogroup across the Corded Ware overall that benefited from a breeding bias in the westernmost area and therefore allowed it to magnify and spread across a vast area, even including other places where Corded Ware had otherwise already been established. L51 rich earlier Corded Ware populations are already starting to turn up in southern Poland and Germany, hinting at the arrival route from the steppes to the Dutch/Rhenish Single Grave area. The spread of L51 a little later with the Bell Beakers is more clearly known, although mapping this to linguistic families within Indo-European is still messy.
• The persistent idea that the Mediterranean fed the Pontic Caspian steppes in the Bronze Age will be overturned, and we will instead discover that gene flow went the other way from the Bronze Age on.

And unrelated to Proto-Indo-European, it will be revealed that Old Kingdoms Egypt will have less sub-Saharan African than present day "Egyptians." In other words, no, you wasn't kangz.

Still to be determined, in my mind, are what exactly was going on in the eastern region of the Proto-Indo-European sphere. The Tocharians came from somewhere and deriving them from the Corded Ware as opposed to Yamnaya seems to be a bit problematic. Or at least the research that would cement that hasn't yet been done. And the immediate post Yamnaya populations of the steppes; like the Catacombs. Where they a back expansion of a Corded Ware variant over a Yamnaya base? That's at least one possibility, while development from the Yamnaya is another. In the past, demic diffusion the other way; from the steppes into the Balkans, in the early Bronze Age has usually been the norm, and has been associated with the supposed founding of the paleo-Balkan Indo-European languages like Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian, Phrygian, and even Greek and Armenian, which all are believed to have entered their more historic homes (in Greece and Armenia respectively, and Anatolia in the case of Phrygian) from the Balkans. But if a case can be made for a Corded Ware rather than Yamnaya origin of the Catacomb culture, then—again, the Corded Ware becomes the Late Proto-Indo-European homeland after all, the revival of a very old theory, which due to genetic research will likely become the leading contender, although it will have become a revision/update of the Kurgan theory model in this scenario. 

Other than Tocharian and the Balkan languages, where the connection to Corded Ware isn't quite as clear, (although especially in the case of the Balkan languages, it looks like it's starting to come together) the rest of the Indo-European languages can already comfortably and in fact obligatorily be sourced to the Corded Ware rather than to any other steppe culture. 

UPDATE: Well, Davidski has changed his tune somewhat from a year ago, so the context in which I said the first point is no longer what he's saying. As he's my go-to expert, I'll take his word for it. He cautions against making too big a deal about Y-DNA markers, given that the earliest Corded Ware and Yamnaya is nearly identical at an autosomal level. While the differences between R1b-L51, Z2103 and R1a-M417 may seem dramatic, especially as one or the other of them exploded in big waves, in reality, he expects all three to be present in the entire pre-Corded Ware and pre-Yamnaya population. In fact, he suggests that upcoming papers will demonstrate that rather the Yamnaya starting as a cultural package in the farthest east of the range, that it actually started on the western edge and moved eastward, including bringing EEF admixture from the west to the east that early Khvalysnk and Progress aDNA samples did not have. So, he's the one who questioned "Is Yamnaya over-rated" about a year ago, saying that neither the Bell Beaker R1b marker nor the Corded Ware R1a marker had been present in Yamnaya, or if there were such samples, he was calling for them to come out, but he seems to have changed his tune and agreed after all that Corded Ware and Yamnaya were the same thing. Albeit with different breeding bias on Y-DNA markers that led to very wide proliferation of certain haplogroups at various times.