During the postwar (post 1945 CE) period, these two theories (Father Wilhelm Schmidt and Father Wilhelm Kopper's theory of primal cultures, and Georg… - Stefan Arvidsson

There are people who, independently of the debate about Dumézil, have main­ tained that the scholarly work on the Indo-Europeans is simply a collection of myths. So, for example, the historian Léon Poliakov titled his book on the Indo-European discourse Le Mythe Aryen. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has described the research on Indo-Europeans as “a modern myth,“ and Bruce Lincoln has argued, in a book analyzing the research about Indo- European mythology, that this research has been “mythology with footnotes.“9 The French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant also calls the nineteenth-century scholarship “a web of scientific myths.“ (5)

The original population that the Indo-European Greeks had vanquished when they penetrated the south­ ern Balkan peninsula had, according to Curtius. not been a Negroid or Near Eastern population, like in South Asia, but rather a primitive Indo-European population fragment (“arisch-pelasgischen Volker“).505 The Hellenes, “the O c­ cidental Aryans,“ and the great culture they created were therefore the result of an adventurous conquest and at the same time, in contrast to the Indian culture, thoroughly Aryan.52

The historian of religions Ulf Drobin clarifies Trubetskoy's point: "all classification must stem from criteria. The followers of the language tree theory avoid definite criteria and replace them with a concept of language that is BOTH changeable (in time) and constant (Indo-European). In the final analysis they end up in paradoxes and mysticism. Ur-Indo-European must either lack prehistory, or it must have a non-Indo-European prehistory. The latter, however, cannot be explained with out some form of criteria" (Arvidsson 2006, p.297, emphasis and parentheses in the original).