"Because the descendants of PIE split many times..."

Like actual descendents, or not necessarily related? Is descendent being used in a 'linguistic family' sense here like not necessarily related people - or can we find out from DNA or similar?

With the pottery, I see how different designs would help, but can't even complex aesthetics be independently arrived - there's only so many ways you can decorate a pot using cords? I'm glad it's not just pot sherds, but I'm still caught on the whole spoon thing, spoons all look the same but we don't say 'spoon culture horizons'. I don't have an issue with technology sharing, it seems natural & makes sense, but when chinaware or even civil service exams spread to England for example we don't say Chinese and English culture are the same or even especially related. Maybe I'm using 'culture' in a less focused way, but what does it mean to call a group of peoples a culture if it's based on a few material artifacts?

"Not trying to put you down, but this paragraph shows how little you understand this stuff."

Oh sure, no worries, I understand very little it's why i'm asking questions.

"You’ve got a pattern of underestimating how much we actually know about ancient people... Greek Gods"

Yeah probably. But aren't Greek gods comparatively easy, we've got written records - this isn't true of much of europe and steppe asia, though, especially prior to greeks writing about them. And they can call a sun god a different name or sex but it's the same thing being worshipped, so how do we differentiate cultures and peoples from that, where it's a comonality of the natural world that pretty much everyone worships in some way? Couldn't any similar name look like a connection, even if it were happenstance? Or is that seen as unlikely?

"Because they spread at different times via different mechanisms. Just totally different situations."

Sure, I was wondering what the different situations were. But I think you indicate it's to do with horse domestication?

"PIEs weren’t the first people in these regions. They were predated by other inhabitants for many thousands of years."

This makes sense, can we reconstruct those older languages from PIE in this case?

"The best bet for how it actually happened is that the PIE made a few key technological advancements related to horses - chariots and saddles, probably - that let them roll over a vast section of the world. Central Asian horse people would continue this for thousands and thousands of years, but the OG PIEs got the farthest because they were mostly going against people who had just started settling into cities and practicing agriculture, not the organized states of later millennia. They didn’t just conquer either, and they often lost - they made no headway in Mesopotamia or the Levant, where there were established states with large scale military organisation. It should be noted this wasn’t some grand empire that ruled all of this land. Just a bunch of different people with an increasingly distant shared heritage spreading and retreating in different waves of conquest, trade, and migration."

That makes a level of sense. But ultimately, is the perspective that their culture and ways of life replaced those of the previous inhabitants? Except where they encountered more organised states I guess? Do we have records from Egypt/mesopotamia of encountering these early PIE peoples like loan words or technology or religious changes?

"We actually do know a lot about how it was spoken. We can read hieroglyphics phonetically."

Really? That's impressive, how do we know how they said the squiggly water one? How does the rosetta stone (isn't it greek/persian/egyptian?) let you do that if it's just writing - does it give grammar/prononciation advice or are there accent symbols that help?

"So, we aren’t reconstructing Egyptian. We know the language pretty well. Reconstruction is for languages that we don’t have any direct records of. What we do is look at their descendants we do have records of (this can be as ancient as Egyptian or Assyrian or as modern as the English we’re using to communicate right now). We use the sound correspondences I mentioned in my last post as the key mechanism. Basically, we can say, “500 years ago, language X could start words with /b/, but then that changed so all of those words start with /p/ now”. We look at the related languages, figure out as many correspondences as possible, and work backwards to figure out what the ancestral language is. We know this works because we can use the methodology on languages with a well-attested ancestor and closely reconstruct that language - basically, use Spanish and Italian and Romanian and reconstruct “Latin” to get something very close to what we actually know about Latin."

this makes sense, thanks. I get the p/b thing, but how do we tell how they pronounced the p or b sound? Translation to greek/persian words? Just because spanish pronounces some letters differently right, even though they're the same. And hebrew has a weird ch sound that's different from other k or c or cz sounds.

Thanks for your patience & explainations! Feel free to tell me to just go read a book and stop bothering you (not wikipedia tho please)

Edit:

Sorry this is too long already, but to lay my cards on the table so to speak, my worry going into this was that for european academics 'culture' has replaced 'race', there's still a 'homeland' for us to conquer, the cultural-lingustic map looks very similar to other maps. By analogy, while i'm sure it's well supported, big bang cosmology looks to me a lot like judeo-christian-greek cosmology - creation from nothing, light first etc. I'm pretty uneducated of course, it's just what it looks like to me, I'm probably wrong but there's also the worry that to the ancient greeks ex-nihilo & then logos seemed very reasonable and well supported too.