Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia (2024)

ArmandoR1b

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06-08-2024, 01:17 AM (This post was last modified: 06-08-2024, 01:19 AM by ArmandoR1b.)

Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia

Librado, P., Tressières, G., Chauvey, L. et al.

Published 06 June 2024

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07597-5

Abstract
Horses revolutionized human history with fast mobility1. However, the timeline between their domestication and widespread integration as a means of transportation remains contentious2–4. Here we assemble a large collection of 475 ancient horse genomes to assess the period when these animals were first reshaped by human agency in Eurasia. We find that reproductive control of the modern domestic lineage emerged ~2,200 BCE (Before Common Era), through close kin mating and shortened generation times. Reproductive control emerged following a severe domestication bottleneck starting no earlier than ~2,700 BCE, and coincided with a sudden expansion across Eurasia that ultimately resulted in the replacement of nearly every local horse lineage. This expansion marked the rise of widespread horse-based mobility in human history, which refutes the commonly-held narrative of large horse herds accompanying the massive migration of steppe peoples across Europe ~3,000 BCE and earlier3,5. Finally, we detect significantly shortened generation times at Botai ~3,500 BCE, a settlement from Central Asia associated with corrals and a subsistence economy centered on horses6,7. This supports local horse husbandry before the rise of modern domestic bloodlines.

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ArmandoR1b

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06-08-2024, 01:22 AM

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ArmandoR1b

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06-08-2024, 01:58 AM

I haven't read the study and I don't have a stance on any of this other than the fact that from about 3600 BC to 2400 BC there was an explosion of Steppe people with R-L23 subclades in a very large swath of Europe and a region in Mongolia. There is evidence of horse bones in the archaeological sites that these people were found in so there is no doubt that they ate horses and maybe used them in some way.

What is the evidence, pro and contra, of Steppe people riding horses? The abstract doesn't really say that the Steppe people didn't ride horses but rather that there weren't large horse herds accompanying the massive migration of steppe peoples across Europe ~3,000 BCE and earlier.

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ArmandoR1b

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06-08-2024, 02:22 AM

The news story at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hors...ity-timing contains statements by Ludovic Orlando, Volker Heyd, and Ursula Brosseder.

Volker Heyd mentions traveling 5,000 kilometers and more in 100 to 200 years. Is it 5,000 km from one end to the other or 2,500 from a central point in two directions adding up to 5,000? 5,000 km in 1 year is 13.7 km per day.

Ursula Brosseder states that people can cover 1,000 kilometers in a month. That's about 33 km per day.

Horses make travel easier for humans but as an example horses normally were rested about every 40 km during the colonial period.

What are the other arguments, pro and contra, of Steppe people riding horses for travel?

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parasar

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06-08-2024, 08:29 PM

Ever since the early formulations of PIE, horses were front and center.

Schleicher (1868) - The Sheep and the Horses
"Avis akvāsas ka. Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram ā bhugat."

Horse riders were also central to Anthony's book.
THE HORSE THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE HOW BRONZE-AGERIDERS FROM THE EURASIAN STEPPES SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD
https://dn790005.ca.archive.org/0/items/...nguage.pdf

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ArmandoR1b

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06-08-2024, 09:45 PM (This post was last modified: 06-08-2024, 10:11 PM by ArmandoR1b.)

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parasar

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06-08-2024, 10:49 PM (This post was last modified: 06-08-2024, 11:17 PM by parasar.)

(06-08-2024, 09:45 PM)ArmandoR1b Wrote: Your argument in the other thread is that Afanasievo did not have horses and therefore horses are not central to Yamnaya R-L23 people? Why did Anthony believe that Afanasievo had horses? What are the oldest horse remains in Afanasievo sites?

Not ridden perhaps, but still central for food?

Or not central at all, just known?

I have not been able to find any reports of horses in Afanasievo.
The Yamnaya supposedly had horse riders in western part per the Heyd group.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451

Another idea per Ringe is that it may be a later shared innovation among still closely connected groups.

Inheritance vs. lexical borrowing: some Indo-European cases.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Ri...lHorse.pdf
"This culture, associated with horses (see below!), appeared abruptly in the Altai around 3500 BCE and appears to represent a migration from the lower Volga area some 2000 miles to the west. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the Afanasievo migration represents the separation of pre-Tocharian from the rest of the family (Anthony 2007:264-5)... But though horses are often referred to in Hittite documents, the scribes never spell the word out (!); instead they use a logogram (word-sign), one of many adopted as part of the cunei­form writing system, which is usually transliterated with the Sumerian phrase ANŠE.KUR.RA ‘donkey of the mountains’ ...
And once again cladistics and archaeology come to our rescue. The presence of this word for ‘horse’ in Tocharian guarantees its existence in the non-Anatolian half of the family by 3500 BCE for the reasons advanced above in the discussion of ‘wheel’. The abrupt separation of Tocharian and the fact that that event can (probably) be traced archaeologically are crucial. Unfortunately the archaeological situation for Anatolian is very different. Anthony’s suggestion that an expansion of the steppe culture into the Danube delta around 4200 BCE reflects the incipient separation of Anatolian from the rest of PIE (Anthony 2007:249-57) is reasonable, but any connection with Anatolia seems to rest on speculation...

This raises a methodological point that we can no longer avoid. Is there any difference between a word which is reconstructable for a protolanguage and a word which spread from dialect to dialect of the protolanguage as it was breaking up?

A final note about ‘horse’: the shape of the Greek word can’t be explained by regular sound changes and plausible analogical changes. The /h-/ of the Classical form is a problem internal to the history of Greek, since it isn’t there in the fossilized compounds used as personal names (thus Ἄλκιππος /Álkippos/ ‘His-horses-are-his-defense’, not Ἄλχιππος /Álkhippos/”). But the /i/ is there from the beginning of our attestation, and it’s a total mystery."

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parasar

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06-09-2024, 12:53 AM

Maybe the eastward migration of Tocharians is much later than we think - say circa 2000 BCE or later.

Mallory:
"The critical issue for these models is that while any and all of them could explain the distribution of domestic animal names, there are serious problems involved with the spread of arable agriculture. As Anthony remarks in this symposium, there is really no serious evidence for arable agriculture (domestic cereals) east of the Dnieper until after c 2000 BCE (see also Ryabogina & Ivanov 2011; Mallory, in press:a). This means that there is also no evidence for domestic cereals in the Asiatic steppe until the Late Bronze Age (Andronovo etc). From the perspective of the Pontic-Caspian model,the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians and Tokharians should not cross the Ural before c 2000 BCE at the very earliest. Hypotheses linking the Tokharians to earlier eastward steppe expansions associated with the Afanasievo or Okunevo cultures of the Yenisei or Altai (Mallory and Mair 2000) become very difficult if not impossible to sustain (as long as there is no evidence of arable agriculture in these cultures) as Tokharian retains elements of the Indo-European agricultural vocabulary. Of course, it should be emphasized that sites of the Afanasievo and Okunevo cultures are overwhelmingly burials that hardly provide the context in which one expects to recover the remains of domestic cereals; moreover, there is no evidence that any of these sites have been excavated in such a way that the recovery of seeds is likely. On the other hand, domestic cereals have been recovered from the site of Begash in the Jungghar mountains at dates of c 2300 BCE (Frachetti 2012) although this site is not connected (so far as we know) with the steppe trajectory of sites (Afanasievo, Okunevo). "
https://www.proto-indo-european.ru/ie-cr...allory.pdf

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06-09-2024, 01:18 AM

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Megalophias

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06-09-2024, 01:52 AM (This post was last modified: 06-09-2024, 02:17 AM by Megalophias.)

According to "The earliest herders of East Asia: examining Afanasievo entry to Central Mongolia", horse remains are indeed found at Afanasievo sites, but it is unclear whether they are domestic or wild. (The sites named are in the northern Altai and Minusinsk Basin, and the sources are in Russian.) There is no ancient DNA from any of these AFAIK (not in the current paper, anyway).

We do have some from the steppes west of the Altai, near the Irtysh River, in southwest Siberia and northeastern Kazakhstan, prior to 2000 BC, and they are all Botai-related. (Who knows, maybe Afanasievo picked up DOM1 horses.)

PS re grain cultivation
In "5,200-year-old cereal grains from the eastern Altai Mountains redate the trans-Eurasian crop exchange":direct dates on barley at ~3300 cal BC and wheat at ~3000 cal BC from Tongtian Cave in the southern Altai (northern Xinjiang). So at least cereals were known in the general area at that time, whether they were actually grown there or salient enough to keep cultural vocabulary about them is another question.

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Megalophias

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06-09-2024, 03:34 AM

I don't have access to the paper, but I looked at the supplements a bit.

They've done a more thorough study of the Corded Ware horses and rule out their having any substantial Steppe horse ancestry (too early for DOM2 anyway). They are intermediate between Neolithic/Copper Age (Funnelbeaker) horses from Jutland and Czechia (and optionally Poland too), suggesting they are local ones (whether wild or domestic). However, these are still from only one site in Germany, so can hardly be taken to represent the entire Corded Ware horizon. Some people have argued that the Funnelbeaker horses were in fact domesticated already.

The previous study had only one horse supposedly associated with Bell Beaker culture, from the earlier phase of Zambujal in Portugal, which belonged to the Iberian horse group. But it was likely too early to even belong to Bell Beaker. In this paper there are several new samples from a couple of Hungarian Bell Beaker to EBA sites (on the Danube in Budapest). The horses here from late 3rd M BC belong to the local Hungarian group, while the ones from the early 2nd M BC are DOM2. This non-Steppe Hungarian group is earlier seen at a Somogyvár-Vinkovci site in SW Hungary ~2500 BC and a Baden site in Austria ~3200 BC, and is also strongly suspected to be domesticated.

I think it's still early days on the horse question.

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06-09-2024, 06:15 PM (This post was last modified: 06-09-2024, 06:26 PM by rmstevens2.)

If a group keeps horses for food, domesticates and herds them, that is extremely difficult to do on foot. A logical inference, therefore, is that such a group, e.g., Botai, Sredny Stog, Yamnaya, learned to ride horses in part in order to herd horses.

It seems just common sense to me that humans who kept horses for food, milk, etc., wouldn't waste much time before jumping on their backs and trying to ride them.

Hard to imagine a tribe herding horses on foot, even with dogs; sheep, yeah, cows, maybe, but not horses.

There is a resistance on the part of certain scholars to the old idea of the "Aryans" invading peninsular Europe as conquerors astride horses. So, there is a tendency to play all that down and make the early Indo-Europeans as "pedestrian" as possible, in both the literal and more figurative senses of that word. They used to do that by denying the evidence for migration altogether. Now they are forced by the genetic evidence to accept the fact of migration, but they are determined to make that migration as low key and unassertive as possible. Basically, they're attempting to neuter it.

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06-09-2024, 06:41 PM

This video is entertaining and informative.

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06-09-2024, 06:42 PM

(06-09-2024, 01:18 AM)parasar Wrote: https://www.researchgate.net/publication...mann_et_al
"Yamnaya culture the main draft force was oxen, which were harnessed to carts, wagons, drags and other vehicles ... the authors of the article in question completely ignore the obvious possibility of the Yamnaya people riding oxen."

If I remember correctly, before the introduction of horses to Afroasiatic-speaking pastoralists they rode Oxen originally (Seen in Neolithic rock art across the Sahara and the Horn). The Southern Cush*tes would introduce the practice to the Khoikhoi peoples in East Africa, who would then emulate it and take it with them to Southern Africa.

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06-09-2024, 09:42 PM

(06-09-2024, 06:42 PM)Necrontyr Wrote:

(06-09-2024, 01:18 AM)parasar Wrote: https://www.researchgate.net/publication...mann_et_al
"Yamnaya culture the main draft force was oxen, which were harnessed to carts, wagons, drags and other vehicles ... the authors of the article in question completely ignore the obvious possibility of the Yamnaya people riding oxen."

If I remember correctly, before the introduction of horses to Afroasiatic-speaking pastoralists they rode Oxen originally (Seen in Neolithic rock art across the Sahara and the Horn). The Southern Cush*tes would introduce the practice to the Khoikhoi peoples in East Africa, who would then emulate it and take it with them to Southern Africa.

I don't doubt that people rode oxen. Watch little kids around big dogs. They'll ride a good natured dog who tolerates them.

That is one of the reasons why I think people were riding horses, or trying to, very early. It's only natural.

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