Proto-Indo-Iranians

Indo-Iranian peoples, also known as Indo-Iranic peoples by scholars, and sometimes as Aryans from their self-designation, are an ethno-linguistic group consisting of the Indo-Aryan, Iranian (or Iranic), and Nuristani people; that is, speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family.

The Proto-Indo-Iranians are commonly identified with the descendants of the Proto-Indo-Europeans known as the Sintashta culture and the subsequent Andronovo culture within the broader Andronovo horizon, and their homeland with an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east.

The term Aryan has generally been used historically to denote the Indo-Iranians because Arya is the self designation of the Indo-Iranian languages and their speakers, specifically the Iranian and the Indo-Aryan peoples, collectively known as the Indo-Iranians. Some scholars now use the term Indo-Iranian to refer to this group, while the term "Aryan" is used to mean "Indo-Iranian" by other scholars such as Josef Wiesehofer and Jaakko Häkkinen.Population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes, also uses the term Aryan to describe the Indo-Iranians.

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