The problem of localizing the ancestral homeland of the Indo-European peoples has been facing science for more than 200 years. Suggested at various times as an ancestral home: India, the slopes of the Himalayas, Central Asia, the Asian steppes, Mesopotamia, the Near or Middle East, the Armenian Highlands, the territories from Western France to the Urals, the territory from the Rhine to the Don, the Black Sea-Caspian steppes, the steppes from the Rhine to the Hindu Kush, areas between the Mediterranean and Altai, Western Europe - are currently rejected by most researchers for one reason or another.
Today, data from paleoclimatology, archeology, paleoanthropology, linguistics, and ethnography indicate: Back in the 19th century, Spiegel proposed the hypothesis of an Eastern European (between 45° N and 69° N) ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans. In the middle of our century, the idea of an Eastern European ancestral home was expressed by A. Scherer.
Currently, these sciences force us to reconsider the traditional historical paradigm, which claims that Eastern Europe during the peak of the Valdai (Ostashkovo) glaciation was almost entirely covered with a glacier and the settlement of its north and center in the post-glacial period (12 thousand years ago) came from beyond the Urals by Finnish- Ugric tribes, and the Indo-Europeans (Slavs) appeared in the north only at the turn of the 1st-2nd millennium AD.
The territory of Eastern Europe for the most part was not occupied by a glacier even at the peak of the Valdai glaciation (20-18 thousand years ago). It was here that Europe's largest zone of mixed and coniferous forests was located, in contrast to the Arctic tundra of Western Europe.
Having appeared in the Paleolithic era (70-50 thousand years ago), the population of Eastern Europe in this territory went through all stages of historical development one after another.
By 10-9 thousand BC. Here a Proto-Indo-European and then an Indo-European language community developed, which split into dialect zones no earlier than 4-3 thousand BC.
The north of Eastern Europe was not inhabited by Finno-Ugrians from ancient times, but is the place of formation and the ancestral home of the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) branch of the Indo-Europeans.
The localization of the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans and Indo-Iranians (Aryans) in the North of Eastern Europe is also confirmed by North Russian topo- and hydronymy, in which a huge number of geographical names are reliably deciphered on the basis of Sanskrit terms.
Zharnikova Svetlana Vasilievna 2000