It must be stressed, and cannot be said often enough, that whatever date is given for 'PIE,' it is necessarily no more than pure speculation.

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Zimmer, Stefan. 1988. "On Dating Indo-European: A Call for Honesty." Journal of Indo-European Studies 16:371-375. 372-5 Zimmer (1988), quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12

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It is therefore historically irresponsible for the linguist to speak of 'Proto-Indo-European' in the 4th millen- nium, and linguistically meaningless for the archaeologist to argue about 'Proto-Indo-Europeans' living somewhere before ca 2500 B.C.

Zimmer (1990a) points out that the inference that the horse was known to the Indo-Europeans is primarily based on such poetic formulas as 'swift horse', 'horses of the sun', 'characterized by good horses', and so on. He feels that "the formulas tell us nothing specific about the use of horses, but archaeology and history supply the necessary information".

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Stefan Zimmer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.

It must be stressed, and cannot be said often enough, that whatever date is given for 'PIE,' it is necessarily no more than pure speculation.

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