The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin… - Stefan Arvidsson

According to Renfrew, there are many pitfalls in the attempt to create an “inventory’’ of Proto-Indo-European words. For example, it can be very difficult to determine whether a word truly is inherited from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary or has been borrowed later from an Indo-European sib­ling language. If this question cannot be resolved, it is impossible to determine whether the object or phenomenon that the word denoted existed in the Proto-Indo-European homeland or is something that people became acquainted with later. And how can we know, Renfrew continues his critical review, that the semantic meaning of a word has been constant over the centuries? Without knowing that, one cannot use the word in question to create a picture of, say, the fauna that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were familiar with.

There were many reasons for this shift (of homeland from Asia to Europe). First of all, the hypothesis of a European homeland accorded with the folklore's focus on Germanic material. A second, closely related reason was that the idea of a northern European homeland was in line with the strong German nationalism that bloomed after the Franco-Prussian War and Germany's unification. One's native land now became more valuable than any dreamed-of colonizable, but foreign lands. Thirdly, the ideas of racial anthropology gained more and more credibility, and according to them, Europe was the origin of the e white Aryan race ((Arvidsson 2006, p.142, parenthesis added).

Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) is among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline, and even outside the academy. For half a century—from the 1930s up until his death—Dumézil was one of the foremost humanists in France, a status which was confirmed at the Panthéon in 1979 when he was welcomed into the Académie Française by Claude Lévi-Strauss as one of the “Forty Immortals.“ The scholarly work that had led Dumézil to this position was based on a wide-ranging hypothesis that all peoples who spoke Indo-European, or, as they were sometimes called even as late as the i960s, "Aryan“ languages had also inherited a common ideology. In the course of his historical and philological research, Dumézil had found traces of this ideology in Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns, and Old Norse saga literature. The ideology was characterized by a special three-part structure that organized distinct cultural fields. This structure above all guided the pantheon and the social order, but also such things as the classification of various kinds of heroic types, punishments, and taxes. At the highest level in this “Indo-European" tripartite structure was the "function“ of the sovereign holders of power—the priests, lawmakers, and kings; below it, that of the warriors; and at the bottom, the function of the people, or producers.