The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

For Renfrew there had to be something in the earlier Neolithic period that sparked the initial, western spread of the richest family of languages in human history. There had to be a hook. His answer is what the British archaeologist terms “agricultural dispersal.” As early as 7000 BC the Stone Age growers would have begun sharing their expertise outside the only logical Proto-Indo-European homeland, Anatolia, where the wild and domesticated plants first met in the cradle of agriculture surrounding Göbekli Tepe. Rather than violently invading the European continent, these earliest Indo-Europeans may have fanned out from the Fertile Crescent with valuable knowledge to share. The technology of farming could have prompted a smoother, more sustainable process of acculturation. Wherever that technology was adopted in each “new ecological niche,” according to the hypothesis, the mother tongue of Proto-Indo-European would have followed.