Originally published in French in 2014, this volume offers a reckoning with the ‘Indo-Europeans’, or ‘Indo-Germans’ as they were primarily referred to in Germany. Although there is no archaeological evidence for a former language, the origin and spread of the Indo-Europeans has been employed in archaeology since the nineteenth century. Since the discovery of lexical and grammatical similarities between many European languages, the search for their former speakers has continued unabated. This search necessarily presupposes a direct connection between a reconstructed language, a specific material culture in the suggested ‘homeland’, and a population migrating everywhere an Indo-European language exists or existed—otherwise the efforts will inevitably come to nothing. These presuppositions cannot and must not be taken for granted. Under the conditions of the modern nation state, it was impossible to imagine anything other than that all three aspects were fundamentally closely linked, i.e. that the linguistic similarities could be traced back to a ‘proto-language’ spoken long ago by a ‘people’ shaped by their material culture. Where and when the supposed Indo-Europeans lived, where the suggested family tree had its roots, has been the subject of fierce controversy for 200 years, which Demoule traces. His specialism is prehistoric archaeology, and this shapes the basis of his argument. In doing so, he situates the linguistic, archaeological, and biological debates not only in the history of research but also in the context of political circumstances. In this way, he succeeds in portraying what others have overlooked or ignored.
The volume is divided into three chronological sections: the nineteenth century (approx. eighty pages), the period up to the end of the Second World War (approx. 100 pages) and developments since then (approx. 220 pages)—presented in nineteen chapters and almost 200 short sections. Demoule traces the idea of a common ‘proto-language’ back to the Bible, and argues that with the Reformation, new national origin myths emerged. For the nineteenth century, the author emphasizes three developments under the motto ‘All is resolved!’: the invention of comparative grammar, the localization of the proto-homeland between India and Germany, and the establishment of ‘scientific racism’. This was not exclusively about research and the development of plausible hypotheses, but also about the question of hierarchies or rankings—of languages, cultures, or ‘races’. Despite some objections, the ‘Indo-European problem’ seemed to have been largely ‘solved’ by the 1900s—in ancient times, there must have been a warlike and conquering people, like a European colonial power.
For Demoule, Auschwitz marked a decisive break. Until then, the ideas that had already been established or existed became entrenched and radicalized: the common language developed into that of an elite or of leaders, without considering competing approaches of structural linguistics. In archaeology, Gustaf Kossinna’s idea of always equating material culture with ‘people’ prevailed, with massive methodological doubts being pushed aside. From there, it was only a small step to assume the existence of biological communities (‘races’), which even renowned archaeologists such as Vere Gordon Childe accepted without hesitation. In the hotly debated question of the Indo-European people’s origin, the steppe theory and the ‘Nordic’ (Scandinavian) theory stood in opposition to each other, depending on where one identified the original homeland. Even in the Soviet Union, a continuity model was established that expressed Nikolai Marr’s rigid stage theory. Racial science and eugenics developed particularly rapidly—and ultimately murderously.
After the end of the Second World War, these ideologies initially disappeared into obscurity; they had discredited themselves too much, their unethical implications were too obvious, far beyond the Indo-European question. However, this interpretative retreat did not last long. Since the 1970s, the Indo-Europeans have once again gained widespread public and research interest. It is not entirely accurate to say that this was a direct continuation of National Socialism (p. 197). Corresponding ideas (apart from the Holocaust) were already widespread before 1933, so that the Nazis only had to draw on them; and after 1945, it was possible to return to these supposedly independent precursors. Although many new methodological approaches were now being tested, the underlying model was neither changed nor questioned: the search for the Indo-Europeans in space and time continued.
Demoule begins with a look at the Nouvelle Droite in France, which invoked the ‘dynamic race’ of Indo-Europeans or Aryans—as the direct ancestors of Europeans, with pagan and ethnic identity, hierarchical and ‘organic’ order, and eugenic purity. At the same time, craniological racial typology was replaced by biological anthropology, with compromised experts such as Raymond Riquet or Ilse Schwidetzky experiencing no disruption to their careers. The family tree model of languages now appeared to be based on blood groups, as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s team claimed in the 1990s. Contrary to exaggerated headlines, current aDNA analyses have not provided any insight into language distribution, as the different languages are not represented in the genes. And there is still no verifiable connection between language and material culture.
What follows is a tour d’horizon of current archaeological knowledge from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Iron Age. If the conventional model of language and people is considered accurate, then an archaeological culture must be identified as that of the ‘original people’, and migrations originating from this region must be traced to all places where an Indo-European language is spoken. The hypothesis of autochthony since the Palaeolithic appears to be more anecdotal than widely supported because of fundamental changes through neolithization. Therefore, one of the two central hypotheses is the Anatolian origin, represented by Childe (Reference Childe1926) and Renfrew (Reference Renfrew1987). Demoule discusses several fundamental problems with this model: scant evidence for Indo-European languages in the presumed area of origin, the large time gap between neolithization and the evidence for Indo-European languages, and inconsistencies between the course of neolithization and language family trees—leading Renfrew to return to the idea of a language union; however, this model proves to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Although Renfrew’s thesis continues to prevail in the English-speaking world as Demoule argues, the steppe theory has significantly more supporters in other parts of Europe.
The steppe theory dates to the nineteenth century and concerns horses and chariots. It is associated with the name of Marija Gimbutas, who developed her views across numerous publications, ultimately contrasting an egalitarian and matrilineal Neolithic society with the patriarchal, hierarchical, and warlike Kurgan culture. Between the two hypotheses—Renfrew and Gimbutas—there is room for more complex models than mere migrations. Demoule explains recent research findings that contradict the steppe theory: the Europe-wide distribution of wild horses, the late domestication of the horse—possibly elsewhere and perhaps not for riding—and its lesser ideological significance. There is no evidence that the Pontic Chalcolithic cultures collapsed under attacks by horsemen, as Gimbutas (Reference Gimbutas, Dexter and Jones-Bley1997) and James Mallory (Reference Mallory1989) claimed. At the time that Demoule’s book was published in French, geneticists ‘identified’ the Yamnaya culture as the possible origin of the Indo-European migration and Central European Corded Ware culture.
The author then examines various migration narratives—Greeks, ‘Aryans’, steppe peoples, Tocharians, Celts, Romans and Italics, Hittites and Anatolians, Germanic, and Slavic peoples—and shows that all migrations are little more than educated guesses and that the details remain unclear. An insightful chapter 16 deals with Georges Dumézil, his academic career and his three-function theory, according to which religion, war, and economics were the three central aspects of the Indo-European cosmos. Since these three functions can also be found among non-Indo-Europeans and, conversely, non-Indo-European elements among Indo-Europeans, it is better to assume networks and influences instead of a family tree. Chapter 17 outlines linguistic reconstructions that align with different family trees, which support either the steppe or the Anatolian hypothesis. These are also linked with different ideas about the chronology. Linguistic palaeontology has also experienced an upswing since the 1980s; what lexical similarities between some, but hardly all, Indo-European languages mean for economic practices and social structure is difficult to assess.
Finally, Demoule considers alternatives. Considering new research conducted over the last few decades, the Migration Period from the fourth to the sixth century ce can be cited as an example of complex historical developments, rendering traditional narratives of homogeneous migrating peoples obsolete. Four conclusions are drawn: language change has many causes; archaeological cultures are categorizing simplifications used in research; they do not correspond to linguistic or ethnic groups; and languages are also not homogeneous and not biologically determined. At the end of the book, the author contrasts the twelve theses of Indo-European research formulated at the beginning with an equal number of antitheses. Accordingly, all three models—‘proto-language’, ‘proto-people’, and archaeological culture—are (1) hypothetical and developed, plausible only under nation-state conditions, (2) methodologically problematic in themselves, and (3) impossible to reconcile, no matter where and when. All premises are more than hypothetical—we do not need a ‘proto-language’, no ‘proto-people’, and no migrations when we want to explain the linguistic similarities, and therefore there is no consensus—and the debate itself remains very hermetic (cf. Blench 1997–Reference Blench1999).
This is a convincing result. With his astonishingly broad knowledge of literature, Demoule is more than able to show how little prehistoric archaeology can contribute to research on where and when which language(s) were spoken before the first written records existed, given the models of the original homeland; it simply lacks access. The linguistic reconstruction of a proto-language and its secondary spread is by no means the only way to explain the striking similarities between ancient and modern languages, even if this is often assumed to be the case. Therefore, caution must be exercised when incorporating aDNA analysis results. Although they prove population history connections, they do not provide any evidence of language spread (contrary to Kristiansen et al. Reference Kristiansen, Kroonen and Willerslev2023; Lazaridis et al. Reference Lazaridis, Patterson, Anthony, Vyazov, Pinhasi and Reich2025). It is unfortunate that promising new analytical methods are usually first tested on outdated models rather than exploring the new interpretative perspectives they offer.
While the disclosure of these fundamental methodological problems is already a key achievement of this book, it also offers a detailed embedding of the Indo-European question into political and ideological contexts. Demoule makes it clear that the debates did not and do not have a purely scientific background, but are linked to ideas of European dominance—whether linguistic or cultural—and thus form a kind of origin myth; ‘racial’ arguments also played a not insignificant role, one need only think of the ‘Aryans’. Demoule’s second major achievement is to have revealed this for the period after 1945 as well. It will no longer be possible to conduct the—presumably ongoing—debates about the Indo-Europeans without this knowledge, although we cannot expect any reliable results.
