NOMADIC HERDERS

The emergence of pastoralism

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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.

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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, and they prospered.  But then, about six thousand years ago, they were struck by a zoonotic disease that they had acquired from their cattle.  The disease was mild in cattle, but as it adapted to spreading from person to person it became extremely virulent.  The cattle themselves were not noticeably affected by the disease, but people died in droves.  The disease subsided within a generation or two as people developed a degree of immunity to it and learned how to deal with it but it was still a deadly disease, and the human population was much reduced from what it had been.

The herders discovered that they had been the epicenter of a pandemic, and farmland to the south had been abandoned as the farmers who sowed grass seeds and other crops there had died.  Many of the animal herders drove their animals into the abandoned fields and pastured them there.

XXXterrible disease struck them.  Human bodies littered the ground, and in response many of the herders moved to the west and took up hunting and gathering, which seemed to be a healthier occupation than animal herding.XXX

XXXThe Yamnaya aquired an immunity to the disease and returned to animal herding.  It took them and other steppe peoples who had been struck by the disease about six hundred years to build up their populations to the point where they needed to seek new pastures.  They found them to the west, and they moved into Europe, which itself had been denuded of its human populations.that had moved there ultimately from Anatolia.XXX

XXXVery gradually the disease subsided, both among those who had stayed in the Caspian Sea region and in those who had fled to the west, but then word came that farmland to the south had been abandoned, and a "gold rush" ensued among the animal herders who stayed with their animals near the Caspian Sea.  They were the hardest-hit, but they were also the first to recover.XXX

Indo European languages

As a result of this intrusion of animal herders into Anatolia, some of the languages that emerged there were derived from the Proto-Indo European language that was spoken by the herders.  This included Hittite, Luwian, and other Indo-European languages of Anatolia.

Linguistic and archaeological evidence indicates that the  Luwian language and people separated from the steppe language and people, (including the ancestral Hittites) about 6,000 years ago and moved into farmland that had been abandoned in northeastern Anatolia.  At the same time, other steppe nomads also separated from the ancestral Hittites and moved to the west, where they interbred with hunter gatherers who had also been hit by the pandemic,.  This left the ancestral Hittites still in the Lower Volga Valley, north of the Caspian Sea.

A population of mixed-race people emerged north of the Black Sea, known as the Yamnaya, emerged from interbreeding between animal herders and hunter gatherers, and their population expanded rapidly, because they kept mating with neighboring people who invariably adopted the language and way of life of the Yamnaya rather than hunting and gathering.  That makes sense, because animal herding was obviously the wave of the future.

Within about 900 years this expanding nexus forced the ancestral Hittites to move south into northeastern Anatolia, disturbing the Luwians, who responded by moving into central Anatolia and from there into southern and western Anatolia and even into islands in the Aegean Sea, displacing or absorbing the indigenous people in those areas.

The Proto-Indo European languages spoken by the ancestral Luwians and Hittites had been evolving all this time, and these closely related languages were the basis for the later Indo European languages of Anatolia, but a somewhat different Proto-Indo European language had evolved among the Yamnaya-related peoples north of the Black Sea, due to their early separation from the ancestral Luwians and Hittites.  The Proto-Indo European language of Yamnaya-related peoples was the root from which most Indo European Languages evolved, including Latin, Greek, German, Russian, Urdu and Sanskrit.

Animal herders will drive their animals in any direction where they can find fresh pastures for their animals, and as they drove their animals west they started to find perfectly good farmland that had been abandoned (because of the pandemic).  The Yamnaya and the other people of the Steppe who were related to them knew about farming, of course, so some of them settled into the abandoned farmland while others continued moving to the west, and eventually came to the English Channel.

The English Channel

It wasn't just their mobility and aggressiveness that had enabled the animal herders to take over Europe.  They had picked up one or more zoonotic diseases from their animals, and these diseases, adapted to spreading person-to-person, had spread faster than all but a few of the animal herders themselves had moved.  The result was that everywhere they went they found local populations practically wiped out.  All the herders needed to do, in most cases, was to take over vacated farmland.

One of the diseases, smallpox, had become much more virulent, because it could only spread person-to-person by way of liquid from the pustules, which often impregnated the clothing and bedding of the victim, whereas in cattle it spread from cows to calves, and death of a cow or calf would prevent further spread of the disease.

The Yamnaya and the animal herders that were related to them carried in their genes a relic of their own exposure to zoonotic diseases:  an increased risk of multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that is caused by an overactive immune system.  Yamnaya-related ancestry continues even today to be a risk factor for multiple sclerosis, and this sensitivity shows up especially i northern Europe and Scandinavia, which have the highest percentage of Yamnaya-related ancestry -- the earlier migration of Anatolian farmers into Europe went mostly to southern and central regions where the climate was better for growing crops.

Interestingly, smallpox was not the disease that had caused the earlier die-off of Anatolian farmers, because the descendants of animal herders who then replaced them were highly susceptible to smallpox.

The smallpox pandemic in Britain

Fishermen and other occasional travelers carried the diseases across the Channel, and the population of Britain was subsequently wip;ed out by tthe disease.  Repopulation of the island was excruciatingly slow because the Channel was a substantial barrier that prevented population movement.  Farmland on  Salisbury Plain, for example, which had been heavily populated, remained empty of human inhabitants for some time.

When the pandemic hit Salisbury Plain, people died in droves, and it gradually it became known that anybody who touched a diseased person or his clothes would surely die.  By that time most of the people were dead or dying.

Subsequently, people who had been infected were often not cared for, and anybody who fell to the ground was left to lie there and rot.  The survivors were very few, and it didn't take them long to come to the decision that they should immediately set off to Wales, in hopes of outrunning the disease.  But even on the way, two women gave birth to stillborn babies with signs of the disease.

Beginning of a slow recovery

In Wales, fewer babies were stillborn, but almost all babies that were born died young, with signs of the disease.  The babies were cremated, and the ashes were buried in a makeshift graveyard.  A large ditch was dug around the burial site, and magical blue stones with unusual long, slender shapes were collected from a rock outcropping, transported to the site, and placed upright so as to guard against the spirit of the disease rising from the ground.

There was much discussion as to what could be done about the high incidence of early death among the young, and finally, somebody suggested that there was no sense in simply continuing to do what they were doing.  Somebody should return to Salisbury Plain and see if things were better there.

Some brave volunteers undertook a journey to Salisbury Plain to see if the disease was still there, or perhaps had simply followed them to Wales.  After harvesting more bluestones from another rock outcropping the volunteers undertook the immense task of transporting the huge stones to Salisbury Plan.

After arriving at Salisbury Plain they set the stones upright to guard their new home and began to farm some plots of ground, using seeds from grasses that they found growing wild.  At the same time they made some pottery in the style of their ancestors in order to cook and serve the grass seeds.  Year by year the harvest improved, and then they sent word back to Wales that the people there should come to Salisbury Plain.

While Britain was gradually being repopulated by survivors of the pandemic, others were repopulating the island by crossing the Channel and settling into abandoned farmland.  Prominent among these were fishermen, but even more prominent were Beaker People; in particular Beaker People from the Netherlands coast who came to Britain to trade with the natives of Britain and instead found abandoned farmland.

The Beaker People

Prior to the arrival of Beaker people in Britain, Beaker communities had spread across large parts of Europe and North Africa, and they must have spoken different primary languages and carried on different traditions in different places.  The main things that almost all of their communities had in common were their interest in trade, their trade connections with other Beaker communities, and the characteristic Beaker shape of some of their pottery.  The beaker shape was utilitarian, which helps to explain why the Beaker people continued to use pottery with this characteristic shape throughout the hundreds of years that the Beaker people continued to dominate trade in large parts of Europe and North Africa.

Although much of their pottery had  a flaring beaker shape, a wide variety of motifs were used for decorating the surfaces of their pottery.

The Beaker people originated on the Iberian Peninsula, and from there Beaker communities hop-scotched into central Europe.  Beaker communities often spread out from trading posts that were established in order to facilitate trade with people in various areas, and local people often moved near the trading centers in order to trade with the Beaker people, forming the nuclei of new Beaker communities which in general spoke the same language and carried on the traditions as those in surrounding communities.  For instance, many of the people who lived in the European Beaker communities were descendants of Yamnaya-related animal herders that had come from the steppes north of the Black Sea.  Those animal herders had been unable to cross the English Channel with their animals, but the Beaker people had no trouble crossing it because they were traders, and often owned seagoing ships.

Even though the new population of Britain was overwhelmingly made up of descendants of Yamnaya-related people, British society continued to be relatively egalitarian, and women continued to play a prominent role in British society.  For instance, British society continued to be matrilocal, meaning that when a couple married, the groom would move into the home owned by the bride's family.

When the Romans arrived in Britain they were astonished to find women in positions of power and that women were sometimes expected to inherit great wealth and power, and that women commanded armies that challenged Roman power in Britain.

Horses for sport

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Chariots

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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.

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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

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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.

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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, the Chalcolithic Age soon arrived in the Eurasian steppes, when substantial deposits of copper were found in the Ural mountains, far to the east.  That was where the Sintashta Culture was centered, at the southern tip of the Ural Mountains.

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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 (which generally contained small amounts of arsenic (most likely by accident).  These metallurgists of the steppes were aware that adding arsenic to copper created a harder, more durable alloy, because they sometimes intentionally did so, and they probably knew that they could avoid the health consequences of smelting arsenic by using tin rather than arsenic to make bronze.  But apparently they never found substantial deposits of tin, and they didn't have access to the tin that was shipped to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea from Europe and Britain.

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Like many of the steppe peoples, the Sintashta loved to ride horses.  Indeed, they were the first to breed flat-back horses that were easier to ride. The flat-backed horses were so popular that within a few years people in what is now Spain were riding them.

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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.

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Wealthy Sintashta men were buried with their chariots, so they could show off their fine vehicles in death as they had in life.

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The ideology of the Yamnaya-related herders

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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, and 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.

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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.

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Among the spirits was the spirit of war.  But what is to be praised about war?  What good comes of war?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Sanskrit

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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.  But even the Brahmins, who are considered to be custodians of the sacred Sanskrit texts, carry only small amounts of DNA that came down to their ancestors from the nomadic herders.  So, where did the nomads go?  They found India not to their liking, and went back to the steppes, as nomads will!

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The pastoralists left their mark

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)