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 who stole the animals, instead of fencing them in, herded them about on the steppe, in the valley of the Lower Volga River, near the Caspian Sea. They prospered; but their very prosperity created a problem: When a man who owned livestock died, a quarrel inevitably broke out among his sons as to who owned the family's animals, and the losers had to steal sheep from other nomadic herders or from farmers.
Invasion of Anatolia
Trying to steal livestock from other herders was very dangerous, because the herders began to hire dispossessed sons to help guard the animals, and the "hired guns" tended to be well practiced at using bows and arrows. Thus, dispossessed sons often traveled long distances in order to find an easier target. Easier targets were plentiful to the south, and dispossessed sons invaded Anatolia en mass.
The army of dispossessed sons not only stole the farmer' animals, but they established kingdoms in Anatolia. At first, they simply stole the homes of the farmers, but then they started hiring builders to construct finer homes, and they hired servants to run their expensive homes. They bought copper from local traders, creating a heavy demand for the metal, and this stimulated traders and miners to mine and produce more copper. As copper became plentiful and cheap, the local kings had it melted down and turned into knives, hatchets, and other weapons. With improved weapons, they expanded their armies, conquered nearby kingdoms, and built cities.
Hittite and proto-Indo European languages
As these kingdoms consolidated, and other peoples in Anatolia adopted the language of the conquerors, the Hittite language began to emerge, but at the same time a sister language emerged on the steppes, spoken by the Yamnaya -- the descendants of those who were still herding animals about on the Steppe. This sister language has been reconstructed by linguists from later Indo European languages (such as Latin, Greek, German, Russian and Urdu), and is known to linguists as the proto-Indo European language.
In the course of time, some of the animal herders of the steppes drove their animals to the west, looking for fresh pastures, and they often married women from the local tribes of hunter-gatherers or farmers. These tribes invariably adopted the Proto-Indo European Language. As the herders moved to the west new cultures arose which were often more complex than the earlier animal-herding culture, but included components of animal herders Not only did the people of these cultures speak languages that were descended from proto-Indo European, but they carried the aggressive ideology of the Yamnaya and passed on ownership of sheep and other animals in the same way, mostly through primogeniture. The people of these cultures are known to archaeologists as Yamnaya-related peoples.
The mobility of the pastoralists and their culture of plunder quickly enabled the pastoralists to gain 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.
However, the invasion of the Isle of Britain was delayed by the English Channel. That offshore island was not easily accessed by animal herders, and female-centered farming societies continued to prevail there until after of Julius Caesar arrived on the island, thousands of years later. Women owned the land and just about everything else, and a man would move into his wife's house when he got married. His main function, aside from procreation, was to guard her wealth.
Migrations into Britain during the Bronze Age came in later waves that were interested in settlement rather than plunder and conquest, and many were interested in trade and in the extraction of tin, copper and other metals. They did not replace or greatly displace the earlier British population, and they seem to have had little effect on sociosexual relations among the bulk of the population. When the Romans arrived in Britain they were astonished to find women in positions of power, that women were sometimes expected to inherit great wealth and power, and that women sometimes commanded armies and were sometimes even willing to challenge Roman power in Britain.
Horses for sport
Donkeys were 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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