East Europe as a proto-homeland of the Indo-Europeans - страница 2

Viktor von Hen responded very interestingly in 1890 about Russian culture: «Russia is a country of eternal change and completely non-conservative, and a country of ultra-conservative customs, where historical times live, and does not 2 part with rituals and representations, no matter how related. The modern culture here is an external gloss, it develops in a wave-like fashion, generates disgusting phenomena; what the Ancient Tradition has preserved with regard to goods, customs, tools, etc., has been invented solidly, rationally, wisely and skillfully used… They are not a young people, but an old one – like the Chinese. All their mistakes are not youthful flaws, but arise from asthenic exhaustion. They are very old, ancient, conservatively preserved all the oldest and do not refuse it. By their language, their superstition, their disposition, etc. you can study the most ancient times.» (Victor Hen, biography. 1894)

N. K. Roerich. Karelian landscape

Among the numerous options for the location of the most ancient Indo-European ancestral home already in the 19th century. O. Spiegel proposed the territory of Eastern Europe between 45 and 69° N It was he who first pointed out the obligatory presence of a mountainous landscape on the Indo-European ancestral homeland, noting the insignificant height of these mountains, since rye and wheat were sown on them, the names of which are in the Indo-European parent language.»

On the territory of Eastern Europe there are not so few elevations, especially in its northern part – Valdai, mountains of the Kola Peninsula and Karelia, Northern Uvals, mountain formations of the Arkhangelsk region, Komi, etc.

Returning to the idea of O. Spiegel that the Indo-European ancestral homeland was located in Eastern Europe between 45 and 69° N, we again repeat that it was here, in the era of the Holocene climatic optimum, identical to the end of the common Indo-European period, that there were mountain landscapes with insignificant heights, where there were excellent and optimal opportunities for growing rye, barley, oats, wheat – cereals, whose names are recorded in the common Indo-European parent language. N. D. Andreev relates the time of the appearance and beginning of the independent evolution of the Early Indo-European Proto-language to the time of transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Mesolithic and the period of the Early Mesolithic, 10—8 thousand BC.