A very problematic excerpt from Drews. Not only do we have evidence of a migration into Anatolia now, from the Reich lab (Lazaridis et al 2025, “The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans”), but even prior to this there were many issues. Mallory lays out that linguists and archaeologists had actually long believed the Anatolian speakers to be intrusive with respect to Asia Minor (see “In Search of the Indo-Europeans”, pp. 24-30; also worth reading are Chapters Six & Seven in the same book). Kloekhorst also outlines the problems in section 4.2.1 of his chapter of “The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited” for positing that Anatolian developed in situ: in my opinion, this short section by Kloekhorst alone trounces the notion. He points out major borrowings to do with basic aspects of settled life, such as buildings, governance, and cult, which are distinguished from safe inheritances from Proto-Indo-Hittite, which have to do with pastoralism. Kloekhorst reminds us of the deep antiquity of sedentism and Neolithic, agricultural lifeways in Anatolia: the pattern of borrowing makes no sense if we assume an Anatolian origin for Indo-Hittite. Anthony also repeats these problems on pp. 43-44 of his “The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World”. Others, such as Goedegebuure (“Petra Goedegebuure | Anatolians on the Move: From Kurgans to Kanesh”, uploaded by “The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures” on YouTube, streamed live on February 5, 2020), but certainly not limited to her, point out the disparity between Indo-European and Anatolian as regards the body of agricultural terminology. There are no cognates to do with farming. We don’t have shared roots for plowing or for grains or really any other type of agriculture (Goedegebuure as mentioned, Kroonen et al in “Indo-European cereal terminology suggests a Northwest Pontic homeland for the core Indo-European languages”, Anthony in his presentation entitled “David Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown: The Yamnaya Origins and the Expansion of Late PIE Languages”, uploaded by “HUN-REN Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont” on June 24, 2024): what we can reconstruct appears to be terminology for wild Chenopodium seeds instead of cereal crops.

What’s absolutely critical here is that we *can* reconstruct words for cattle and horses, and while horses were not plowing fields until the Mediaeval era with the invention of a proper collar, as heavy loads will choke them if fitted with yokes for cattle, they are capable of pulling light loads: we also can reconstruct, absolutely crucially, words for “yoke” and “thill” for Indo-Hittite (Anthony in HWL, Pereltsvaig & Lewis, Niskanen in “The prehistoric origins of the domestic horse and horseback riding”). I came up with the idea that in Indo-Hittite times, cattle and horses were used to pull sleds, and I was delighted to see that scholars had also come up with this idea, and they also expand the concept to the travois, positing sleds more for winter use (which is logical).
Drews is telling us that Indo-Hittite spread out of Anatolia with the “Waves of Advance” posited by Renfrew: we then would expect words for agriculture to be present and shared between Anatolian and Indo-European, and we *do not* find these. This is a killshot unto itself for a model where Indo-Hittite was spread by agriculture. Drews makes the assumption that any migration into Anatolia would simply have been a back-migration of peoples already speaking Indo-Hittite, but this, again, is literally an assumption, and is totally contradicted by the actual linguistic evidence. He claims there would be no reason for a migration into Anatolia, which was less fertile than Europe and which had an arid climate, but aridity is not the problem for pastoralists it is for farmers. The lack of evidence he claims for a Chalcolithic migration is further addressed by Kloekhorst in his contribution in IEPR, where Kloekhorst points out that scholars have just *assumed* that there were no migrations and have been stubborn in re-evaluating the evidence: they posited that there were no migrations, this then became established tradition, and the field of Anatolian archaeology, separate from other schools, say to do with Europe, has been unjustifiably entrenched ever since then. I doubt Kloekhorst had Drews in mind when he said this, but Drews is unjustifiably relying on this to help bolster his case. Drews will also contradict himself, re: aridity, in short order when addressing the question of the Neolithic expansion into the Pontic-Caspian steppe, as we will see.

There are more problems. Drews admits that Anatolian is identifiable as belonging to the same family as Indo-European, but argues that Anatolian developed in situ in Asia Minor: all other branches of Indo-Hittite would therefore be, in essence, younger than Anatolian. We should expect therefore an identifiably Indo-Hittite, but non-Indo-European, substrate in Europe, as he does later argue that there were expansions from the Pontic-Caspian steppe into Europe to bring Indo-European languages, again as we will see. This is not what we find. It’s sufficient, basically, to just state that outright. For one thing, Basque isn’t Indo-Hittite (and even if one subscribes to the hypothesis of Blevins, that it is related to Indo-Hittite, it would be the most divergent branch, but her work isn’t accepted and even then we should expect it to be more related to Indo-European than the Anatolian languages are), and for a full treatment of the question of pre-Indo-European substrates in Europe, I recommend the entire book published by De Gruyter, “Sub-Indo-European Europe: Problems, Methods, Results”. These substrates just are not Indo-Hittite: simple as that.

Curiously, Drews cited Anthony’s HWL and Pereltsvaig & Lewis’ IEC, but he doesn’t… actually appear to have read these works. Both of these, especially Pereltsvaig & Lewis, more-or-less spit-roast the idea of an Anatolian genesis over a fire. Pereltsvaig & Lewis specifically authored their book to counter a model put forward by Gray & Atkinson, which Drews doesn’t reference or cite, but nonetheless IEC is a tour de force against the notion of any kind of Anatolian Urheimat. It doesn’t work, it’s impossible.

Drews also ignores several more problems. One of the main issues with the Out-of-India hypothesis is that all the languages appeared to have radiated in a single direction with the exception of limited further colonization within India: the northwest. It can rightly be asked why Indo-European languages were able to make it to Ireland and Iberia but not Indochina and Indonesia: likewise, a spread connected with Near Eastern agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution also demands an explanation for why Indo-Hittite languages are not found across the Middle East: why are Hurro-Urartian, Hattian, Sumerian, Elamite, and Afro-Asiatic not Indo-Hittite languages? Why is there no connection to these languages? Why is there no substrate? Even limited attempts to show certain substrates, such as Gordon Whittaker’s Euphratic hypothesis for southern Mesopotamia, do not answer the gist of this question: why are Indo-Hittite languages not the most entrenched in their place of origin?

Another question presents itself: why is it so impossible to posit a spread into Anatolia if spreads into the Levant (Mitanni), Iran, and the Indus Valley, also urbanized and taken over by pastoralist peoples, and cradles of the Neolithic in their own rights, are clearly what happened? Drews does not dispute this even though it has long been known that these spreads are at least somewhat archaeologically problematic. There is bizarre special pleading for Anatolia which is not even shared by linguists and historically by archaeologists, even though Anatolian archaeology is, as mentioned, somewhat behind the times when it comes to accepting and/or re-interpreting evidence for migrations, which have been justified in other contexts.

Finally, speaking of languages, Drews does not address in this chapter the question of Indo-Uralic: connections between Indo-Hittite and Uralic have long been posited, with many linguists suspecting a genetic connection, even if they might not be able to decidedly prove one, because of similarities in the deep structures of the language. It’s beyond the scope of the discussion here to delve into it now, but suffice it to say, Drews’ account does not explain how these connections would come to be, and be at such a deep level, if Indo-Hittite originated in southwest Asia Minor. Uralic is understood to have originated somewhere in northern Russia or thereabouts, because it geographically is much more constrained than Indo-Hittite languages are: the question of the homeland of Uralic is very different compared to Indo-Hittite. Since it shows deep ties with Indo-Hittite, which Indo-Hittite does not share with other families, it demands an explanation of either genetic relatedness or prolonged contact, and Anatolian, with its loss of connection to other Indo-European speakers who would be near Uralic speakers, (Drews will mention a “clean break” or total severance between Anatolian and Indo-European speakers shortly), becomes a thorn in his side in light of this.