Yang et al. 2024: Inferring language dispersal patterns with velocity field estimatio

[Jaska]

To me it's rather fascinating to see that when everyone thought the steppe origin of Indo-European languages was a done deal, in recent years the Middle Eastern origin hypothesis seems to gain new adherents in the scientific field. I welcome this, because it pushes scientists to refine even better and with more accuracy their positions.

True. But many of these challenging propositions are based on erroneous (like this one) or unreliable methods (like most wordlist-based calculations), and they do not even try to disprove the actual linguistic evidence supporting the steppe homeland. Unfortunately here more quantity means less quality.

Admittedly, Early Proto-Indo-European = Proto-Indo-Anatolian is a bit more open to interpretations, although Late Proto-Indo-European can hardly move away from the steppe any more. In any case, these methodologically weaker studies would have any value only if there were no unambiguous results achieved by reliable linguistic methods.