In The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European some of the world ?s leading experts in historical linguistics shed new light on two hypotheses about the prehistory of the Indo-European language family, the so-called Indo-Anatolian and Indo-Uralic hypotheses. The Indo-Anatolian hypothesis states that the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family should be viewed as a sister language of ?classical ? Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of all the other, non-Anatolian branches. The common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, including Anatolian, can then be called Proto-Indo-Anatolian. The Indo-Uralic hypothesis states that the closest genetic relative of Indo-European is the Uralic language family, and that both derive from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-Uralic. The book unravels the history of these hypotheses and scrutinizes the evidence for and against them. Contributors are Stefan H. Bauhaus, Rasmus G. Bj�?rn, Dag Haug, Petri Kallio, Simona Klemen?i?, Alwin Kloekhorst, Frederik Kortlandt, Guus Kroonen, Martin J. K�?mmel, Milan Lopuha��-Zwakenberg, Alexander Lubotsky, Rosemarie L�?hr, Micha��l Peyrot, Tijmen Pronk, Andrei Sideltsev, Michiel de Vaan, Mikhail Zhivlov.