WI: Another group takes the place of the Indo Europeans

Ultimately I am curious as to which group of peoples could have potentially spread out as far and wide as the Indo-Europeans did in OTL. Ultimately, lets start with a small, but significant POD. The Indo-Europeans would still exist, but they are not the masters of the horse that we know them to be. Could Uralic or Turkic peoples have taken their role? What would potential migrations be like then?
 
Ultimately I am curious as to which group of peoples could have potentially spread out as far and wide as the Indo-Europeans did in OTL. Ultimately, lets start with a small, but significant POD. The Indo-Europeans would still exist, but they are not the masters of the horse that we know them to be. Could Uralic or Turkic peoples have taken their role? What would potential migrations be like then?

Maybe Uralic speakers, but Turks don't appear on the scene until several millenia later.
 
Weren't the Uralic people mostly well north in the forested zones of Eurasia at the point IOTL the Indo-Europeans expanded? Without the horse they don't have much of an advantage.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
I bet on Uralic peoples first. Then Basque,then Native Northern Europeans. I wonder how South Asia and West Asia looked like if Northern European expansion had happened and how the world would be today!
 
Perhaps the Afro-Asiatic languages? They are already spread fairly widely in our timeline, but in a world where Carthage had decisively defeated Rome early on and had become the dominant power of the Mediterranean, or if the early Muslim conquerors had taken Constantinople and won the Battle of Tours or some equivalent, then Punic or Arabic could have eventually displaced the Indo-European languages in much of Europe, if not the entire continent. Centuries or millennia later, Semitic successor states to Carthage or the Caliphate in Southern and Western Europe could have established colonial empires in the same way that Spain, Portugal, France, and others did historically, firmly spreading their languages across the entire world.
 
There were probably quite a few other languages in the Pontic-Caucasian milieu at the time. If you want to have horse-riding nomad migrations like OTL, you can't discount the idea of a sister language to PIE or maybe Proto-Kartvelian to fill that role.
 
Limiting our focus to the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE only, I suppose our best bets are Northwest- or Northeast Caucasian language-speaking groups, or Uralic speakers, or whatever language the ancestors of the BMAC spoke.
 
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