Everything you’ve said here was my own starting point.. I, too, can read wikipedia, and ask Grok or ChatGPT for the current scholarly consensus. Now, after having read a wealth of older historical works and compared these to the genetic/archaeological picture, I wince at having so readily believed these things so completely and naively.

Language and genetics are indeed different things (bravo to your keen eye!), but few sensible people would doubt that a singular people family was responsible for the spread of this language family over much of the globe. You have absolutely no evidence that a racial understanding of a familial heritage (like Arya, Aryan) didn’t exist in the PIE.. you claim it definitively didn’t because we as yet lack hard evidence, but simply assuming it not to be the case seems beyond absurd to me. We have no evidence they developed this racial understanding or took on this label at a later date, either.. it’s simply that the first we hear of this very specific term is a bit later, because recorded history is as bare bones as it gets - especially when it comes to the steppe peoples.

It’s no coincidence that the closest modern relatives to the Yamnaya are in Norway, Iceland, etc.. I’m not sure how you’d use mental gymnastics to argue this away, but it’s clear what the overwhelming consensus of post-war scholarship was - which is why we took on the name ‘Aryan’ for our people family.

The aggressive argument against using this term is as confusing as it is tedious.. can you explain why you’re so dead set against the idea that there was an ancestral recognition amongst these peoples?

You take an incredibly reductionist approach, and engage in semantics, to a degree I can’t wrap my head around.. but you seem emotionally invested, to boot. Can you tell me why it’d be such a net-negative to recognize the ties that bind across the core/root of this larger people family?

I don’t suspect we’ll ever come to an agreement, here, so I’m not sure how fruitful this discussion will be.. you seem to take the extremely recent (and highly politicized) modern scholarship as absolute gospel, without the least bit of questioning as to potential motive.. can you answer honestly:

Do you sincerely believe there is no ulterior motive to ensuring the concept ‘Aryan’ as recognized by 1930’s Europe never experiences a revival?

There’s no part of you that wonders why academia seems as obsessively committed as you are to somehow fracture and separate these branches, as far as is possible, and pretend there are few if any common roots (despite the fact that PIE language and culture is fairly well attested, and admitted to by even the wildest extremes on your end of the spectrum)?

Do you recognize that the frameworks and people labels you accept so literally and without question are most certainly not the ways in which ancient peoples would’ve thought of (or divided) themselves?