In his early years, C.C. Uhlenbeck was particularly interested in the problem of the Indo-European homeland (1895, 1897). He rejected Herman Hirt's theory (1892) that the words for 'birch' , 'willow' , 'spruce' , 'oak' , 'beech' and 'eel' point to Lithuania and its immediate surroundings and returned to Otto Schrader's view (1883, 1890) that the original homeland must rather be sought in southern Russia and may have included some of the later Germanic and Iranian territories. It is clear that the Mediterranean region and the area around the North Sea can safely be excluded because the arrival of the Indo-Europeans was comparatively recent here, as it was in Iran and the Indian subcontinent. It is difficult to be more specific within the limits of central and eastern Europe and central Asia. Uhlenbeck was impressed by the lexical correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic which had been adduced in favor of an eastern homeland but pointed out that borrowings from Semitic may have reached the Indo-Europeans through an intermediary. He agrees that the Indo-European words for trees and animals point to a moderate climate but questions the possibility of a more specific localization as well as the concept of homeland itself. Uhlenbeck identifies the Slavic word for 'dog' pĭsŭ with the Indo-European word for 'livestock' *peḱu and its original meaning as 'domestic animal'. Unlike Hirt (1895), he recognizes that the Indo-Europeans were pastoralists before they became agriculturalists, as is clear from the absence of common words for 'plough' , 'field' , 'grain' and suchlike. While Armenian shares many agricultural terms with the languages of Europe, these are absent from Indo-Iranian. The common Indo-European vocabulary reflects a stage of development when weaponry was made of stone, wood, bones and hides (cf. Schrader 1890: 320-346). It includes words for 'cart' (ὄχος), 'wheel' (κύκλος), 'axle' (ἄξων), 'yoke' (ζυγόν), 'carpenter' (τέκτων), '(wooden) house' (δόμος), 'vessel' (ναῦς), 'to plait' (πλέκω), 'to weave' (ὑφαίνω), 'to spin' (νέω), 'garment' (εἷμα) and 'to clothe' (ἕννῡμι). The population of Denmark and Scandinavia did not speak an Indo-European language before the advent of pastoralism, which puts these countries beyond the original homeland. The introduction of the cart was evidently more recent than the domestication of cattle, which were used as draught animals. All Indo-European languages have the same words for 'ox' , 'sheep' , 'goat' , 'horse' and
