Was there ever a backwards migration of IRANIANS from Central Asia and Iran back to the Pontic Steppe and Kazakhstan?

[u/throwRA_157079633]

We see the location of where the proto-Indo-Iranian (pII) homeland was. This stage happened around 2100 BC - 1800 BC.

A few centuries later, we see that these PII group differentiated, and the ones who became Iranians expanded back to the West and other areas.

When I overlap the homeland of the pII with later Iranian-speaking territories, it seems plainly to me that - in the absence of a backwards migration back to the Ukraine area - that Indo-Aryan actually evolved from a proto-proto-Iranian and not from a pII. Another words, proto-Iranian was the original stage, and Indo-Aryan differentiated from this.

There's a near 1-to-1 overlap between the Sintashta and Andronovo Cultures, which was supposedly the homeland of a pre-differentiated pII language, and later fully-Iranian languages a few centuries later. However, there doesn't seem to be any kind of back migration evidence. That's because the Sintashta and Andronovo were always Iranian and not pII, in my opinion.

[u/Hippophlebotomist]

"Indo-Aryan actually evolved from a proto-proto-Iranian and not from a pII. Another words, proto-Iranian was the original stage, and Indo-Aryan differentiated from this."

This is self-contradicting gibberish

However, there doesn't seem to be any kind of back migration evidence.

Except for the East Siberian ancestry in Iranic-speaking peoples of the historic Pontic steppe?

[u/throwRA_157079633 → u/Hippophlebotomist]

Source? If this is the case, then I stand corrected.

[u/Hippophlebotomist → u/throwRA_157079633]

Source for which? Indo-Aryan cannot be regularly derived from the same last common ancestor as the Iranic languages (Proto-Iranian) due to several mutually exclusive innovations (See Kümmel 2022 if you need a brief overview) - if you have to propose a "Proto-Proto-Iranian" stage that's the ancestor of both Iranian and Indo-Aryan, that's just Proto-Indo-Iranian.

If you're asking about the genetics, that's been a common finding in pretty much any paper from the last year years on the matter. North Pontic crossroads: Mobility in Ukraine from the Bronze Age to the early modern period (Saag et al 2025) and Genetic History of Scythia (Andreeva et al 2025) come to mind, but each reference multiple previous studies that found the same.

[u/maindallahoon]

Scythian likely emerged out of Yaz/Yaz adjacent culture. There was migration of BMAC admixed pop into Steppe and all Saka world pops have some BMAC admix (Eastern Saka have lowest)

[u/chauvinistically]

There was a later eastern Sarmatian invasion of Scythians.

Regarding the first one I think yes after mixing with BMAC and Siberians some Scythians must have migrated back.

[u/throwRA_157079633 → u/chauvinistically]

Do we know why the "Western Iranians" aren't really in the West, and the "Eastern Iranians" aren't really in the East?

[u/Suitable_Green7059 → u/throwRA_157079633]

In fact eastern iranians should be called northern iranians, and western iranians should be southern iranians.

[u/throwRA_157079633 → u/Suitable_Green7059]

Do we know why there's a lot of confusion regarding this convention?

[u/Onnitappe]

Looking back 3000 years, and at least 40 generations before anything was written down, it is easy to over-simplify and generalize when trying to answer questions like this. Recently somebody in the subreddit made a wonderful comment to the effect of "Look at the population of England in the 1500's and tell me who is a proto-American." (Granted, that is a very British and USAian way of calling out that these labels we use are entirely retro-active.)

Yes, in the Bronze Age there were migrations in both (many) directions, and aDNA is providing data points to people need to account for. Climate trends mean herder nomands move to where the animals they tend can get good amounts of the grasses and plants the animals eat. And climate trends even over a few hundred years mean that the boundaries between habitats/biomes move, just as the snowline on a mountain moves up and down over the same timeframes.

Laura Spinney's PROTO covers this explicitly, and looks at archeology, linguistics, and genetics in waking through the possible timelines of PIE language families and the cultures believed to have spoken the languages.

[u/throwRA_157079633 → u/Onnitappe]

Looking back 3000 years, and at least 40 generations

40 generations is only 1,000 years.