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This may already have been discussed here but I see that Paul Heggarty is at it again, (Beating the Retreat from the Steppe Hypothesis) , although now he's suggesting that the IE language originated not in Anatolia where he originally placed it, but in the S. Caucasus and NW Iran. And he says that the 2025 Lazaridis paper supports him.
https://www.academia.edu/resource/work/127485847
Here's a quote: "The new data (from Lazaridis) reconfirm that it is essentially this component (S. Caucasus NW Iran), from this region, that expands. One movement heads northwards to become the main ancestry component of core Yamna. The paper blurs this direction over time by its presentation of a ‘cline’ that it calls “Caucasus–lower Volga” (CLV), but the key population movement is spreading from the Caucasus end and heading northwards, not from the lower Volga southwards. The CLV cline itself is questionable: it has very few samples in the middle. Most importantly for interpretations with respect to Indo-European languages, the dotted lines that delineate this cline in Figure 1 are arbitrary in including one CHG sample but not the other, and thus also excluding the Neolithic Iran samples, even though they are just next to it (see figure reproduced and annotated below). The paper also makes it all the clearer that core Yamna was essentially an incoming population: 80% of its ancestry originated further south, and most of that ultimately from the Caucasus/Zagros region. That is of course where other hypotheses on Indo-European origins had long placed the family’s homeland, whether on
linguistic grounds (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, 1995) or archaeological ones (Renfrew 1987). Now that this new paper supports that original homeland from genetic data too, the next big questions are obvious. Which branch(es) of the language family spread north to end up as core Yamna on the Steppe, and to emerge later from there? And which branches never went through the Steppe, but emerged independently out of the South Caucasus/Zagros homeland, spreading in directions other than northwards?
... This paper does now accept that the Anatolian branch did not emerge from the Steppe. This therefore
contradicts the Steppe hypothesis, which had always specifically claimed that Anatolian also emerged from the Steppe ... "
Thoughts?