> In very short order, horses went from being a steppe curiosity to the foundation of authority for one of the largest civilizations of East Asia.
I've got a pet theory about some western mythological tropes where horses are the economic and technological development that ties them together. the essential idea is that the young heroes mentored by centaurs (achillies and chiron, etc.) and "wisdom originating in the east," come from horse tribes from the steppes influencing proto-greek civilization, where centaurs came to represent those plainspeople in their mythology. as in central and east asia, by the result of being given empires, horsemanship was a channel for both evolutionary and divine assent, where if these other beings in nature favoured the people with the qualitites to ride them, then they were chosen to lead. horses became a force of evolutionary selection for us.
it's basically an "ancient aliens" quality theory about horses, which I'm sure archeologists will love as much as they do the tv one, but horses are more than just a thread in our history, they are a force of it. relating to other beings in a complete cultural symbiosis like that seems like a key evolutionary achievement to unlock on the way to becoming starfaring, and if you have any background working with them, they are rare companion beings to us in the real of nature we inhabit. lunacy? perhaps, but experiencing the world with horses isn't just pony rides, it's an encompassing philosophical pursuit.
subordinating a predator is very different from getting the trust and willingness of a prey animal though. the other difference is that a horse is taught to overcome its instincts, particularly its flight instinct when we ride them into danger, and effectively we educate them, where a predator takes less finesse to manage.
Various units have varied propensity to rout under pressure, and various officers have better or worse mods for the rolls to either (a) keep the unit from routing, or (b) reestablish its cohesion after they have.
I sometimes[0] think of those rolls when dealing with a spook.
(and, really, it won't take much to convince me that the amount of "presence attack" needed to convince a horse [or other four-legged[1] creature] that no, we are not going to die, we just need to do what we've already practiced, by the numbers is probably very closely related to the amount for convincing two-legged enlisted creatures that no, we are not going to die, we just need to do what we've already practiced, by the numbers...)
[0] it can also be useful during human childbirth (before the senior non-coms —the nurses— take over, anyway), but that's a much rarer event in my world than the "invisible squirrel" or "suspicious agricultural implement which was not there just yesterday".
[1] the Carter was usually the 2nd highest paid farm employee (as a specialist, more than the general manager) in the pre-mechanisation days here.
Horses get used to things surprisingly easily. (Kinda like people.)
If you train them close to people firing guns, they won't flee from guns.
Some horses want to "overthrown" you even in normal circumstances, and almost all of them have a light instinct of getting you out from their backs. But I imagine a large part of forming a cavalry is picking (and breeding and training) the best horses for the role.
> Such data show us that important cultural developments in the fourth millennium B.C.E.—including the Yamnaya migration and the dissemination of kurgans and Indo-European culture—probably took place many centuries before the first horses were domesticated
I can't find the citations to this in the article.
The tone of the article seems like this author has a particular schtick with the Yamnaya and / or the Indo Europeans. A lot of academia and journalists do this so not surprised.
Reading the abstract is a lot more pleasant than the article, which rambles.
Sounds like the author is supporting a theory that horse-riding spread along with Indo-Iranian languages (Sintashta culture) rather than earlier. Which doesn't seem crazy to me.
Horses were definitely livestock for a long time before that, kept for meat and dairy. They were very useful on the steppe because unlike cattle (which were imported from elsewhere), they can dig through snow to forage.
I do not understand how this article undermines the Kurgan Hypothesis. The modern horse enters the picture later according to those discoveries, but it is still within the right time frame and geographic location.
I think it's more that there's a more drastic/stricter version of the Kurgan hypothesis that sees Yamnaya migration + Horses + Indo-European language spread as all one packaged good, spreading in a rapid wave from the steppe.
Whereas this author is arguing that the horse part happened later.
We already know the cultural-linguistic spread was more complicated than Gimbutas' original theory. That's not really controversial.
The Fall of Civilizations podcast has just released a two-parter on the Mongols. I only just started the first ep, but anyone interested in this article might be interested in that. It’s a great show if you love history.
Dan Carlin is the prime example of someone reading Wikipedia and a bunch of way too old books. He is an entertainer, not someone that can teach you about history.
But it is good entertainment, and his 'Blueprint for the Apocalypse' series, while not always accurate, does a good job conveying the gruesome reality of WW I warfare
... Eh? Unless the author is thousands of years old, the Kurgan Hypothesis is hardly likely to be a _political_ issue for them.
(This kind of was politicised a bit in the 19th century, with German nationalists in particular being keen on the idea that Proto-Indo-European languages ultimately came from _Germany_, but no-one believes that anymore and none of the competing modern theories have the same sort of political weight to them.)
And this article doesn't even question that horses were domesticated in the Black Sea and Pontic Steppe, just that it happened later than Anthony postulated.
There's no "political" angle here. GP commenter is out of line, and dragging culture wars crap in where it doesn't make any sense.
. . . what? The German nationalists believed that the Proto-Indo-European or Aryan race was Nordic, but not that it came from Germany. They sent archaeological expeditions into the Middle East looking for "confirmation" of their nonsense.
Interesting; I'll have to go down that rabbit hole sometime. I wasn't familiar; only with the other Nazi pseudoscience where they tried to insist that "Aryans" were Nordic even though they were from the Indo-European urheimat.
Okay, fair, none of the competing modern theories which have any academic acceptance. Like, I don't think anyone _but_ Hindu nationalists go for the out-of-India thing.
I don't think it's fair to dismiss the OIT hypothesis as a Hindu nationalist thing. I wrote some more about it in a comment on this article, but it actually just seems like the most likely explanation given the evidence.
Arguing the archeology, genetics, and (grudgingly, it's barely a science) linguistics is totally fair but I'd like to see more open-minded debate on the data.
The Mitanni (1500 BCE) and the Tarim Basin mummies partially Indian DNA are important points to address, but the Sarasvati river dating has to force a dramatic re-think of how Indo-European languages spread.
I am reluctant to engage with this, but... Sigh...
I have to ask... How do you explain the Anatolian languages?
Or what seems like a very clear progression: Sintashta -> Andronovo -> BMAC -> Indo-Aryan.
A long history in the subcontinent that predates BMAC does not imply linguistic continuity.
There's such an overwhelming set of evidence linguistic and materially... there's a reason why, yes, it's just Hindu nationalists/fundamentalists parroting this position.
Splitting the argument into two pieces is most concise:
1) Sarasvati river paleochannel radiocarbon dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit (<=3000 BCE)
I talked about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330343
This is by far the strongest piece of evidence that the Kurgan model for IE language diffusion, which has Indo-European languages entering India circa ~1500 BCE, is grossly incorrect.
We now know the Sarasvati, the most prominent river mentioned in archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit texts, began to desiccate and disappear in 2600 BCE. That desiccation process is actually mentioned in later Sanskrit works like the Mahabharata, in Sanskrit that has significantly linguistically evolved.
There are hundreds of urban sites along the now-dried Sarasvati riverbed which have now been discovered, like Bhirrana, with cultural continuity back to 7500 BCE. But let's steelman the Kurgan model and assume there was a replacement of this advanced urban society's language by IE-speaking Steppe nomads, that left no archeological trace whatsoever. This still means that Indo-European languages were in India at least by 3000 BCE, making this the oldest attested Indo-European language in the world.
I would challenge you to explain how the Sarasvati paleochannel evidence doesn't completely break the Kurgan model. Even leaving aside the Sanskrit corpus which does not remember any migration or original homeland of the Aryans before India.
2) Anatolian languages (1800 BCE)
The earliest hard chronology of Hittite is the Anitta text of the Kussara (1800 BCE). The linguistic analysis (such as it is, linguistics isn't the hardest science, much less so than radiocarbon dating) implies this IE branch diverged early. Like the dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit to at least 3000 BCE, it's likely the Hittite language was evolving for hundreds of years before this.
Did IVC settlers directly migrate to Anatolia? Was there a cultural domino effect spilling out from the IVC to the BMAC, then either north through the Caucasus or south through Iran / Mesopotamia? We don't know.
We do know there were widespread cultural and economic ties between India and the Middle East at least as far back as 3300 BCE. IVC seals and finely-wrought carnelian beads were discovered in the royal Sumerian tombs in Ur, and many texts described the thriving economic trade between these two regions. Indian DNA has been found in Syria in 2500 BCE. The Mittani in ~1500 BCE are an even clearer example, with Rig Vedic deities, a military elite, and a horse-training text that are distinctly Indo-Aryan, not even Indo-Iranian.
In other words, cultural and human diffusion from India to the Middle East was already happening hundreds of years before the first attested Anatolian IE language is found in the Hittite.
And we know it was happening in the other direction (east) as well. The Tarim Basim mummies had Indian genetic markers, implying the Tocharian branch of IE may have also arisen out of India.
The IVC culture had a bigger population than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. It was an advanced and urbanized culture. There were major environmental shocks that caused mass migrations. There has been migration out of India from at least 3300 BCE to the common era with the Gypies / Romani.
Is it so hard to believe IE languages could have come from such a place?
> Did IVC settlers directly migrate to Anatolia? Was there a cultural domino effect spilling out from the IVC to the BMAC, then either north through the Caucasus or south through Iran / Mesopotamia? We don't know.
Except the directional flow of what you're describing here is exactly opposite of what the archeological evidence shows.. with clear material cultural continuity in an eastern/south-eastern direction from the Black Sea to south Asia.
It's likely that when the Indo-Iranian languages arrived in south Asia they were already in the process of heavy fusing with local cultures, esp in the BMAC. References in Sanskrit writings about events that may precede Sanskrit speaking doesn't prove anything. There are plenty of cases of elite language replacement, and it's likely an elite class spoke IE and potentially even translated and wrote down non-IE oral histories.
Cultures are not necessarily languages or "peoples." Language replacement is a common phenomenon. India can be India with an insanely long deep amazing history that the world recognizes as rich and powerful and ancient... without being the origin of one of the languages spoken there.
In any case, non-IE languages continue to prosper in the subcontinent, and probably did even more so among regular people back then. Which is very much not the case for the central European region, unless you count the crazy linguistic patchwork in the Caucasus (which is heavily divided up by mountains).
Anatolian divergence happened very early, so much so that it has an entirely different gender system than all other IE languages. And lacked common IE words related to horse riding, chariots, metal-working, etc. By the time of the written documents you describe, it had already diverged into several distinct languages, implying a long history in the region. Likely a founding population that made its way around the Black Sea on some path.
And a similar phenomenon to India: established itself as a local elite over a population that spoke a different language, and kept oral histories and eventually wrote in their own language about the gods and stories of the people they fused with.
Anyways, the strongest evidence is in the common IE vocabulary -- esp around plants and animals -- which is strongly biased towards the temperate climate around the steppe.
You're not explaining how the Sarasvati river evidence, which is radiocarbon dated, does not fully contradict your position.
Do you really believe, in good faith, that the most parsimonious explanation is that a small group of IE-speaking nomads entered India 500+ years after the Sarasvati was drying and population centers had been abandoned, then re-purposed the entire history of the "native" population, wrote themselves completely out of this re-purposing with no memory of where the nomads themselves came from, and then at least hundreds of years after that re-wrote the story of the desiccation of the river (in significantly evolved, non-Rig Vedic Sanskrit) to read as if it was occurring then, ~1000+ years after it actually occurred?
Occam's razor here is clear.
The Rig Vedic speakers were in India when the Sarasvati was a fully flowing river pre-3000 BCE, they documented the drying of the river in later Sanskrit texts, and the Rig Vedic IE corpus was created by at least 3000 BCE based on the radiocarbon dating of the Sarasvati's paleochannel.
This strengthens the Out-of-India hypothesis for Indo-European languages. The hardest evidence we have is the paleoarcheology of the Sarasvati river.
The peak flow of the Sarasvati was 10,000 BCE - 3000 BCE. Tectonic shifts and climate change caused the river to dwindle from 2600 BCE - 1900 BCE. From ~1900 BCE on the river fully desiccated and no longer reached the Arabian Sea.
We see hundreds of urban sites along the dried path of the ancient Sarasvati. For example, Bhirrana in northern India which has its earliest radiocarbon-dated layers at 7500 BCE.
There is cultural continuity between the early IVC sites (7000 BCE) and later (3000 - 2000 BCE) sites.
Now connect this with the vast corpus of Sanskrit works, particularly archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit. We know the Sarasvati was described as perennial and large river reaching the sea in those works.
Later Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata, with language features implying hundreds or thousands of years of linguistic evolution, describe the river dwindling and eventually disappearing "underground".
This means Rig Vedic Sanskrit was being used in parallel with the extremely large and advanced urban society in the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), which was larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, at least in 3000 BCE.
The drying of the Sarasvati, which is known to have preceded vast migrations from the northwest Indian subcontinent to the northeast Gangetic plain, may have well forced climate-change migrants north into Central Asia, Mesopotamia and the steppes as well in the gradual lead-up to the Sarasvati's full collapse.
The current idea that Indo-European language entered India ~1500 BCE is completely incorrect, and oddly there's been no attempt to re-formulate the Indo-European language origins theory to match the data.
I've got a pet theory about some western mythological tropes where horses are the economic and technological development that ties them together. the essential idea is that the young heroes mentored by centaurs (achillies and chiron, etc.) and "wisdom originating in the east," come from horse tribes from the steppes influencing proto-greek civilization, where centaurs came to represent those plainspeople in their mythology. as in central and east asia, by the result of being given empires, horsemanship was a channel for both evolutionary and divine assent, where if these other beings in nature favoured the people with the qualitites to ride them, then they were chosen to lead. horses became a force of evolutionary selection for us.
it's basically an "ancient aliens" quality theory about horses, which I'm sure archeologists will love as much as they do the tv one, but horses are more than just a thread in our history, they are a force of it. relating to other beings in a complete cultural symbiosis like that seems like a key evolutionary achievement to unlock on the way to becoming starfaring, and if you have any background working with them, they are rare companion beings to us in the real of nature we inhabit. lunacy? perhaps, but experiencing the world with horses isn't just pony rides, it's an encompassing philosophical pursuit.