About half the population of the modern world speaks a language belonging to the Indo-European family - English, Spanish, Hindi and so on.
Two thousand years ago Indo-European languages were spoken less widely but still over a vast area, from Western Europe through Turkey and Iran to northern India. Why? Where did the original Indo-European speakers come from? How and when did they spread?
Although we have some clues from archaeology and literary and linguistic sources, these answers to these questions are still hotly disputed. Some scholars now believe that the Indo-European homeland was in the area north of the Black Sea and the Caspian. This is the area where herding was evolving into pastoral nomadism during the period from 4000 to 2000 BC, when its inhabitants were beginning to ride horses.
Horse-riding nomads move with their herds and can travel long distances, and are often not averse to seizing control of the lands of their farming neighbours. It was as horse-riding nomads that the Indo-Europeans appeared in the centuries around 2000 BC in the lands of the literate West Asians, and by their own oral accounts this is what the Indo-Europeans were when they entered India. But how and when the Indo-European languages spread into western, central and northern Europe is still unclear.
