Bellwood rejects the Pontic steppe homeland hypothesis

Bellwood rejects the Pontic steppe hypothesis.
"For instance, Jim Mallory (1997), one of the staunchest supporters
of a Pontic Homeland, is clearly no longer convinced that domesticated
horses and wheeled vehicles MUST be reconstructed to PIE (although
wild horses could be another matter). Neither are linguists James
Clarkson (2000), Robert Coleman (1988: 450), Calvert Watkins (1985),
and historian Igor Diakonov (1985). The reconstructed PIE vocabulary
was not exclusively pastoralist, and neither is the archaeological
record entirely pastoralist from the relevant period on the steppes
(Mallory 1997; Anthony and Brown 2000). Recent research on horse
domestication archaeologist Marsha Levine (et. al 1999) suggests much
later dates for horse riding, only late second millennium BC and thus
irrelevant for PIE dispersal. Many linguists are now willing to
entertain suggestions that PIE could be older than 5000 years (see
below), and the idea that the Anatolian languages were not native to
Anatolia (and thus not relevant for IE homeland questions) has no
strong factual basis. But the fundamental nail in the coffin of the
Pontic steppes hypothesis was hammered by Colin Renfrew (1987), when
he asked how a KURGAN-based expansion of late Neolithic and Bronze Age
conquering pastoralists across most of Europe could have left
absolutely no corresponding continent-wide horizon in the
archaeological record (Bellwood 2005, p. 204, emphasis in the original)."
Bellwood, Peter (2005), "First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural
Societies," Malden, MA, Oxford England: Blackwell Publishing

M. Kelkar