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The Armenian hypothesis, also known as the Near Eastern model,[1] is a theory of the Proto-Indo-European homeland, initially proposed by linguists Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the early 1980s, which suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 5th–4th millennia BC in "eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia".[2]
Recent ancient DNA research has led to renewed suggestions of a Caucasian homeland for a 'pre-proto-Indo-European'.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Particularly, an admixture between the Khvalynsk and Caucasian Copper Age burials gave rise to the ancestry that later became known as a typical marker (WSH – Western Steppe Herders) of the Yamnaya pastoralists.[9] It also lends support to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, according to which both proto-Anatolian and proto-Indo-European split off from a common mother language "no later than the 4th millennium BCE."[10] These suggestions have been disputed in other recent research, which still locates the origin of the ancestor of proto-Indo-European in the Eastern European/Eurasian steppe[11][12][13] or from a hybridization of both steppe and Northwest-Caucasian languages.[13][note 1] The origin of the Anatolian languages according to the Near Eastern model has also been challenged because "[a]mong comparative linguists, a Balkan route for the introduction of Anatolian IE is generally considered more likely than a passage through the Caucasus, due, for example, to greater Anatolian IE presence and language diversity in the west."[5]
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