This all started 5,000 years ago. That’s when, give or take a millennium or two, the journey began, which ended with me writing and you reading these words in English.

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Retracing every last twist in the path from there to here, no doubt, would make for a gripping book. However, that is not the book J. P. Mallory wrote. His sole concern in The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story is its starting point, specifically, determining where it was. He hopes to do this by applying the results of new genetic studies and, combining them with the evidence already provided by other disciplines, finally answering a question that, for over two centuries (and really two millennia), has confounded a phalanx of scholars of all stripes: linguists, biblical exegetes, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, folklorists and mythographers, ethnographers, and now even geneticists alike, running the gamut from professionals to amateurs and enthusiasts to outright cranks.

“Where in time and space can we locate the source of the world’s largest language family?” Where and when, in other words, was the homeland of the Indo-Europeans?

Mallory’s the man to find it. Arguably the leading English-speaking authority on the subject, over the last 50 years, he has published countless books and articles about the Indo-Europeans, the Proto-Indo-European language, and related matters. He also spent two decades editing the leading academic journal in the field. If anyone is capable of unraveling the mystery of the Indo-European homeland, it’s him.

And it is a mystery. No theory grasps every language of the Indo-European family or can account for every inch of its expansion across Eurasia. “More than two centuries” after Sir William Jones’s epochal 1786 lecture to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal about the striking affinity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin put it on the map, Mallory observes, “There is still no totally convincing solution to the homeland question that fully explains the origins and expansions of the Indo-European languages.” Every model is plagued by gaps of one kind or another. If it satisfactorily explains developments to the east, it falls short in the west. If it is solid archaeologically, it stumbles linguistically. If it’s the right place, it’s the wrong time.

Undoubtedly, that’s one of the main reasons there have been so many of them, with locations for the homeland identified in every corner of the globe, from India to Scandinavia and everywhere in between, and even Antarctica and Atlantis. Or perhaps the Aryans originated in another galaxy or universe. Yes, the quest has crossed even into other worlds and dimensions.

Following a brief overview of the history of the subject and the myriad solutions that have been offered, both credible and off-the-wall, Mallory devotes the first half of his book to a succinct yet comprehensive analysis of the techniques and methods that have been used to track down the Indo-Europeans. These include history, archaeology and anthropology, geography and cartography, genetics, and a heavy dose of linguistics. The latter runs the gamut from elementary vocabulary, river and place names, and cognate terms, to morphemes, morphology, and phylogeny, and “linguistic palaeontology.”

Mallory does a commendable job elucidating the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, the ways they buttress and contradict one another, and how they sustain and deprecate the various models. For instance, scholars have shown special interest in the presence or absence of words for specific animals and geological features in the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European to eliminate or corroborate candidates for the Urheimat. If there was no word for “mountain,” perhaps that means the homeland was not in a mountainous region. Another way of ruling out a contender is by establishing where non-Indo-European tongues were spoken. A place where one was is unlikely to have been the origin of another. Whether target populations had matrilineal or patrilineal societies, access to wheels and horses, practiced agriculture, or were pastoralists are also important factors. These are but a few examples, and it goes without saying that Mallory’s treatment is far richer and deeper than I can convey here.

The second half of the book is where the promised “scientific revolution” of the subtitle comes in. Two scientific papers in 2015, according to Mallory, utterly transformed the field. Whereas hitherto genetics “could be used to support almost any homeland theory,” these studies’ authors offered what appeared to be definitive proof pointing to one particular genetic source for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Much of the technical discussion of haplogroups, clines, ancient, autosomal, and mitochondrial DNA, and Y-chromosome types, frankly, went in one eye and out the other. But Mallory’s conclusion, as he sorts through what the new genetic evidence says about the three most popular models for the Indo-European homeland (the Anatolian, the Caucasus, and the Steppe), is clear enough: The likeliest location of the Urheimat, the ultimate source of the Indo-Europeans and all their descendants who speak and write English and hundreds of other languages, is the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

If this is a revolution, it is so in the traditional sense of a return to where one started. Really, it is more a retelling or confirmation using new data to validate a very old solution. As Mallory concedes, though the 2015 papers “were indeed game-changers … the game is far from over.” Not least because there are still lacunae, such as any good explanation for the Tocharians, an obscure group of Indo-European speakers in what is now northwestern China, or for how most of Iran and India were Indo-Europeanized.

That Mallory’s picture remains incomplete may be disappointing, but his effort is anything but. The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered is a synthesis in the best sense: It combines prodigious amounts of research in a way that makes it intelligible to the layman without overwhelming them with details or stripping out so many that they can never escape a lingering sense that something is missing. Moreover, though extremely dense at times, it is never heavy. Mallory’s vast learning is gracefully wielded and deftly deployed. Recondite as the subject is, it never becomes abstruse, despite abounding with so many obscure or unusual terms (onomastics, glottochronology, velar, isoglosses, and ergativity, to name a few) that nearly every reader will find at least one that baffles them.

A PORTRAIT OF TWO MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE

If, “after a half-century of study,” Mallory is “pretty much where I started,” he finds himself in the good company “of the generations of homeland hunters over the last few thousand years,” whom he “can’t help but hear” laughing, though surely with and not at him. Like them, his quest too ended “where tradition has placed the Indo-European homeland for 2,500 years.” Mallory ruefully admits that, because it affirms the most widely accepted theory for the origins of the Indo-Europeans, his solution to the mystery, that they came from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, is no revelation and something of an anti-climax. “A bit disheartening,” as he puts it. Nonetheless, of all the proposed contenders, “it seems to me to be still the least bad.” 

What makes Mallory’s tome so successful and valuable, as are all the best books of its kind, is that it’s a one-stop shop. If, like me, you knew barely anything about the Indo-Europeans going in, going out, you’ll be fully up-to-date. Maybe it whets your appetite for more. But if not, you won’t need it. It’s the hoariest of clichés to say of a book, “If you read only one about something, make it this one.” This time, the cliché is true.

Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on X @varadmehta.