However, ethnographers and archaeologists paid attention to another side of Marrs theory. Marr waged a war against Indo-Europeanist comparative historical linguistics, which supposed that a protolanguage had branched into different languages during the course of the migration of ethnic groups from their original homeland. His version of linguistic history was that different socioeconomic developmental stages produced different languages, which re-mained in todays world as relicts. The most important origin of linguistic changes was not external mass migrations but revolutionary shifts of socioeco-nomic systems, as well as the intercrossing (skreshchenie) of words and languag-es.37 His followers applied this idea to cultural and ethnic history, adding an ethnoterritorial aspect to it. His closest disciple, Ivan Meshchaninov, argued that material culture changed according to the developmental stages, and while migration could stimulate these changes, foreign (chuzhie) elements derived from migration were secondary to local elements.38