The emergence of pastoralism
Another thing that happened as herbivores became scarce in farming areas was that some of the farmers began to fence in the animals and cull them throughout the year. The animals that were least cooperative in this endeavor were the first to be slaughtered, and this amounted to selection for tameness. The animals whose ancestors had been so selected then became much tamer and easier to manage than their fully wild ancestors.
Subsequently, some of the farmers who moved north, onto the steppes of southern Eurasia found that farms were not as productive there, and began to enlarge their pastures and depend more on their animals for sustenance.
They must have regretted their decision to move to the steppe, because nomads came in from the north and stole their livestock, leaving them totally dependent on what crops they could grow on the steppe.
The nomads, instead of fencing in their animals, herded them about on the steppe, and they prospered. Their population burgeoned, as well as the number of animals that they herded about, and they spread in every direction.
The Proto-Indo-European language
The new pastoralists spoke a language which became known to them as Proto-Indo-European, and they were quite sure that they were superior to all other peoples.
Because they did not fence in their animals, they were quite mobile, and their methods of raising their animals were quite efficient. Their own population burgeoned, along with the number of animals that they herded about, and as their population grew they conquered neighboring tribes, who themselves adopted similar methods of herding animals about and living off of their animals.
The animal herders spoke closely related dialects and spread aggressive ideologies that were quite different from toe ideologies developed by the farmers. Their language is known as Proto-Indo European to linguists who have reconstructed it.
Among the tribes of animal herders were the Yamnaya, and the tribes who herded about their animals are collectively known as Yamnaya-related peoples.
They saw themselves as wolves, and they were like wolves in some ways, due in part to their rules of inheritance and succession, which encouraged young men to seek their fortunes by plunder, rather than to remain under the thumb of the patriarch, who was probably their father. One is reminded of the myth of Remus and Romulus.
The young men would often raid farmers who fenced their animals in and steal their animals. Such animals belonged to whoever had stolen them, and ownership of a herd of animals would enable the owner to become a patriarch himself.
These rules created an ever-expanding frontier that expanded in every direction, and eventually reached Europe.
The constant raiding of other peoples often led to war, and wars were fought by young men seeking plunder. Such young men often died young, but those who did not die obtained their herds of animals, married, and most likely sent off some of their own sons to seek their fortunes. Those who obtained their herds by plundering others invariably married women from those whom they plundered.
Pastoralist rulers and ruling societies
The pastoralists spread in every direction. One would think that the kingdoms to the south, in Anatolia, with their standing armies, would stand in their way, but the pastoralists seemed to think that they were immortal and the soldiers in those armies soon learned that when the pastoralists approached, the best thing to do was to run. One by one, the armies of Anatolia fell before the armies of young herders who had no animals to herd.
At the same time that some of the pastoralists were driving into Anatolia, others were driving their animals into Europe, where they quickly gained the upper hand almost everywhere they went, including present-day Greece, Italy, France and Spain as well as throughout northern Europe. Very few societies escaped domination by the pastoralists.
The first wave of pastoralists were not able to reach the Isles of Britain and Eyer in sufficient numbers because their animals could not swim well enough, but the second wave, Celts who came looking for copper, tin and gold as well as land, did very well there. Ships regularly carried copper and tin ingots from the Isle of Britain to the eastern Mediterranean, where metallurgists alloyed copper with tin to make Bronze, which was harder and stronger than pure copper.
On the Italian Peninsula the Etruscans made the mistake of conquering and subjugating the Romans, who were cultural descendants of nomadic herders. The Etruscans, for their part. were sophisticated, but culturally they were descendants of farmers, and the close association between these incompatible cultures set the Romans on a path to pick off the Etruscan city-states, one by one, and then grind their noses in the dirt. The Romans did that for no better reason than their disgust for the Etruscans, who, like many early farmers, cared so little about fatherhood that nobody seemed to know who their father was, or to care.
The contempt of the Romans was so deep-seated that the Etruscans dared not use their own language, once the Romans got the upper hand. Consequently, their language died so completely that linguists struggle to learn the barest essentials of the language from tombstones, which always mention mothers but never fathers. (Linguists today do not know the Etruscan word for "father".)
Hence, the pastoralists spread their language and ideology into almost every nook and cranny of the continent. Indo-European-based languages are spoken today throughout Europe, and many ancient religions were based on Indo-European ideology.
Horses for sport
Donkeys had been domesticated in northern Africa, and used for carrying goods; and onagers had been domesticated in the Middle East, and used for pulling wagons. But the animal herders of the steppes used their equines purely for sport. They sat astride their horses and persuaded them to do their bidding. Those horses that could not be so persuaded were discarded.
In this way obedient equines were bred -- not as tame as donkeys and domesticated onagers. Once trained (again, by persuasion and force) a horse could be ridden, and such horses were highly valued and carefully bred. In later times, a trained horse who trusted its rider could be persuaded to do almost anything a trusted rider demanded of it, like run like the wind or even to keep going until it dropped to the ground from exhaustion.
The animal herders were not interested in commerce, and they used horses purely for sport; they did not use their horses to carry goods, and horses were selectively bred for how well they obeyed commands, not how useful they were for carrying things.
The rider would sit astride a horse and try to signal it to do what he wanted it to do. Just staying on a horse under these conditions was often very difficult: The rider, in order to stay on a horse, would have to squeeze his thighs together and halfway stand up each time the horse moved, and this leads to strain on the thigh bones and the rider's hips. The result of this strain has been noted by archaeologists who examine fossils of the horseback riders.
Riding horses in this fashion was also hazardous, as were many things that were done by young men who were expected to do dangerous things like bareback riding and making war. They often died young.
Young men often bleed a lot from wounds sustained in fights. and positive selection for those with ramped-up production of red blood cell led to a haemochromatosis, in which the circulatory system becomes so overloaded with red blood cells that the oxygen that they carry was toxic.
This condition can be deadly, but it was selected for because its deadly consequences were felt later in life, after the young man had procreated. It was better than dying young from loss of blood.
Chariots
The first wheeled wagons were pulled by oxen, and they were used for transporting people and/or goods, but oxen move so slowly! Therefore, impatient wealthy people started hooking up to teams of onagers to light-weight wagons. This worked moderately well, but onagers were poor at following directions, and were prone to going off in the wrong direction. It was then found that horses were better at following directions.
While the animal herders of the steppes were not interested in commerce, they were interested in war, and this led some descendants of animal herders to learn from Anatolians about both metallurgy and the construction of chariots. These were the Sintashta, whose metallurgical centers were located near the southern tip of the Ural mountains.
The Sintashta Culture
Many of the animal herders whose ancestors had driven their animals into Europe and taken control of it turned around and drove their animals back to the Eurasian steppes. Presumably, the settled lives of those in Europe was not to their liking.
The steppe was still the steppe, but the Bronze Age had come even there. While the Bronze Age, or the Copper/Bronze Age, was centered in Anatolia, where it supplied opposing armies with copper and bronze weapons, in the Eurasian steppes its center was in the Ural region, where copper deposits were to be found.
The Sintashta culture was not just an offshoot of the animal-herding cultures, but it was close to it. People there, near the southern end of the Ural Mountains, built chariots, and they made things out of copper. They also made things out of a special bronze that was an alloy of copper and arsenic. They used arsenic instead of tin because they could not obtain tin, which had to be shipped clear from the Isle of Britain. The wealthy shippers who controlled the supply of tin offloaded their ingots of tin at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.
Like all steppe peoples, the Sintashta loved to ride horses. They bred flat-back horses that were so popular that within a few years people (men) in what is now Spain were riding them.
The Sintashta bred horses the same way the herdsmen of the steppes bred horses: sitting astride and mastering them, and discarding those that could not be mastered Horses that were best at following the commands of a rider were also best for pulling chariots.
Wealthy Sintashta men were buried with their chariots, so they could show off their fine vehicles in death as they had in life.
The ideology of the Yamnaya-related herders
Like the Sinashtra people, many of the Yamnaya-related peoples were not animal herders themselves, but they often made common cause with other Yamnaya-related peoples.
The ideologies of Yamnaya-related peoples were the seed from which many religions and myths grew, including Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, and Zoroastrianism. But of particular interest to us are the Vedas, poems that were composed by Yamnaya-related people and written down in Sanscrit.
The Vedas are poems of praise. They praise the creators of the Universe, as well as other spirits: the spirits of the sun, moon and other heavenly bodies, the spirits of phenomena and of occurrences such as fire, the dawn, storms and rain. Virtues such as honor and the faithful performance of ceremonies were also personified in the Vedas, as spirits.
Among the spirits was the spirit of war. But what is to be praised about war? What good comes of war?
To understand why war needed to be praised, we need to consider the Crusades of the Middle Ages and the concept of a Holy War -- while we may or may not agree that these conflicts were worthy of praise, the participants most likely felt that they were, because they expected the ultimate outcome to be good. The poets who wrote the Vedas considered that war prepares vanquished peoples to become friends of the victors, as well as their collaborators, and the poets compared this good outcome to the way in which rain prepares the soil for new growth.
Thus, the spirit of war was often identified as the spirit of rain, as well. By extolling the spirit of rain. which prepares the earth for new growth, and then identifying the spirit of rain with the spirit of war, the poet encouraged his listeners to disregard the destructive aspects of war. This is similar to what Adolf Hitler did when he advocated in Mein Kampf that Germans should move into the "empty space" that was currently occupied by Slavs, and what European expansionists did when they spoke of moving into "empty" spaces in Africa, Australia, and America.
War and persuasion were the instruments by which the Yamnaya-related peoples spread their language and culture into much of Eurasia: west into western Europe, south into Anatolia and the Iranian Plateau, east across the Eurasian steppes and, again, south into South Asia.
Sanskrit
Sanskrit is an ancient Indo-European language that is spoken today only in recitations of the Vedas and other sacred writings that were produced by Yamnaya-related people who invaded South Asia from the Eurasian steppes by way of mountain passes. In a short time, they became aristocrats in new societies that were ruled by the Yamnaya-related rulers.
Almost everywhere they went, the Yamnaya-related invaders were outnumbered by the people they conquered, and this was especially true in South Asia. Even the Brahmins, who were considered to be the custodians of the sacred Sanskrit texts carry only small amounts of DNA that came down to them from their aristocratic and priestly ancestors. This mixing of blood lines probably happened before the Caste system was fully put into place.
The pastoralists left their mark
Yamnaya-related peoples left their mark, everyplace they went. They left their language, which evolved into the Indo-European language family, and they left their ideology. The spirits that had been praised by the Yamnaya-related poets evolved into the gods that were worshipped by Greeks, by Romans, by Norse warriors, and by others. Mars, for example, was worshipped by the Romans as the god of war.
Moreover, the peoples conquered by the Yamnaya-related invaders tended to adopt the socio-sexual arrangements of their new rulers. Thus, the Greeks came to devalue women and the Romans brought home slaves to do the farm labor that had previously been done by women.
The pastoralists of the steppes were most likely blocked from moving into China by the large population of farmers that possessed that territory, but the pastoralists left their mark even in distant Korea, where much of the land needed to be terraced and irrigated before it was good for growing rice. Distant echoes of the Proto-Indo European language can be heard in simple Korean words like those for the numbers "one", "two" and "three", for "mother", and for other close relations.
Interestingly, the Indo-European languages that are native to India were not derived from the Sanskrit language that was brought there by Yamnaya-related people. Rather, the Indo European languages of South Asia were derived from an Indo European language that was brought there by farmers that had entered South Asia by the same route but earlier, before the Yamnaya-related people got there. The language that the farmers brought with them was originally from the Iranian region. (The farmers had interbred with Yamnaya-related people and absorbed some parts of their ideology, but they did not speak the Sanskrit language.)
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