Editing Proto-Indo-Europeans (section)

===Anatolian hypothesis===
[[Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza]] and [[Alberto Piazza]] argue that Renfrew and Gimbutas reinforce rather than contradict each other. {{Harvcoltxt|Cavalli-Sforza|2000}} states that "It is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey." {{harvtxt|Piazza|Cavalli-Sforza|2006}} state that:
{{blockquote|if the expansions began at 9,500 years ago from Anatolia and at 6,000 years ago from the [[Yamnaya culture]] region, then a 3,500-year period elapsed during their migration to the [[Volga River|Volga]]-[[Don River (Russia)|Don]] region from Anatolia, probably through the [[Balkans]]. There a completely new, mostly pastoral culture developed under the stimulus of an environment unfavourable to standard agriculture, but offering new attractive possibilities. Our hypothesis is, therefore, that Indo-European languages derived from a secondary expansion from the [[Yamnaya culture]] region after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.}}
 
[[Spencer Wells]] suggests in a 2001 study that the origin, distribution and age of the [[R1a1]] [[haplotype]] points to an ancient migration, possibly corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion across the [[Eurasian steppe]] around 3000 BC.{{sfn|Wells|2002|p={{page needed|date=September 2021}}}}

About his old teacher Cavalli-Sforza's proposal, {{Harvcoltxt|Wells|2002|p={{page needed|date=September 2021}}}} states that "there is nothing to contradict this model, although the genetic patterns do not provide clear support either", and instead argues that the evidence is much stronger for Gimbutas' model:
{{blockquote|While we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. There is clearly ''some'' genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe.}}