Лингвофорум

"If we can identify Indo-Hittite and Indo-European with the beginning and the
end of the Sredny Stog culture, respectively, it will be clear that the linguistic evi-
dence from our family does not lead us beyond Gimbutas' secondary homeland
and that the Khvalynsk culture on the middle Volga and the Maykop culture in the
northern Caucasus cannot be identified with the Indo-Europeans. Any proposal
which goes beyond the Sredny Stog culture must start from the possible affinities
of Indo-European with other language families. It is usually recognized that the
best candidate in this respect is the Uralic language family, while further connec-
tions with the Altaic languages and perhaps even Dravidian are possible. The hy-
pothesis that Indo-European is genetically related to a Caucasian language family
or to Afro-Asiatic seems much less probable to me. What we do have to take into
account is the typological similarity of Proto-Indo-European to the North-West
Caucasian languages. If this similarity can be attributed to areal factors, we may
think of Indo-European as a branch of Uralo-Altaic which was transformed under
the influence of a Caucasian substratum. It now appears that this view is actually
supported by the archaeological evidence. If it is correct, we may locate the earli-
est ancestors of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European north of the Caspian Sea in
the seventh millennium (cf. Mallory 1989: 192f.). This is essentially in agreement
with Gimbutas' theory. [Cf. now Kortlandt 1989.]"