PIT GRAVE CULTURE IN THE DANUBE BASIN: IMMIGRANTS OR INVADERS? (CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND LANGUAGE DIVERSITY) LOLITA NIKOLOVA (Salt Lake City, United States of America) Key-words: Danubian Basin, Pit Grave Culture, immigrants or invaders. Abstract: In this work, the main characteristics of the Pit Grave Culture in Europe are to be summarized in the context of the general cultural picture of later European prehistory to show that geneticists obviously need to focus on other models instead the invasion model as the primary tool to explain their genetic results. Setting: Archaeology, Language and Genetics Pit Grave Culture has been a subject of professional interest from various perspectives. One extreme is using this culture to explain the distribution of the Indo-European languages in Europe (see e.g., Klejn et alii 2017). The most recent research on languages is much more advanced and shows that the distribution and evolution of languages is very often a result of interactions between smaller or bigger groups. Since none of the archaeological theories except the Paleolithic can cover the whole area of Indo-European languages, it needs to be accepted that the whole history of human civilization is also a history of increasing or decreasing similarities and differences between languages, in particular in Eurasia. As the origin of the similarities between Indo-European languages is analyzed based on very limited data, a long-diachronic evolution in combination with regional intensive interactions and population dynamics of different scale (from temporary contacts to marriages, refugees, small or bigger migrations) is a scholarly model (see e.g., Otte 2017), which can unite rather than divide the scientists studying origins and cultural evolution in Eurasia. The genetic approach to in-depth cultural modeling including the proposed Neanderthal genetic heritage (e.g., Dannemann & Kelso 2017; Karmin et alii 2017) also increased the need of retheoretization of Prehistory from the perspectives of the diachronic biological and cultural evolution. What is the place of the Pit Grave Culture in the prehistoric interactive model? Many years of serious research on the Pit Grave Culture showed that the theory of Marija Gimbutas is incorrect regarding the role of Pit Grave Culture in later European prehistory (Nikolova 1999 and references cited there). Recently, however, geneticists’ inability to find a proper theory for interpreting their genetic data again made Pit Grave Culture a victim of scholarly pitfalls (Nikolova 2018 and references cited there). Although new genetic studies support the genealogical model of spread of genes and of explaining some similarities in the haplogroups - for instance, between the Corded Ware Culture and Pit Grave