Mario Alinei

Mario Alinei (10 August 1926 – 9 August 2018) was an Italian linguist. While notable for his well-respected dialectology work (including the Atlas Linguarum Europae), Alinei was also controversial for some of his linguistic theories. Most notable was his "Paleolithic Continuity" hypothesis of Indo-European origins, positing that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the Paleolithic (rather than the Neolithic as most other linguists and archaeologists propose).