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 Pontic Steppe found that the climate was less reliable there, and began to enlarge their pastures and depend more on their animals for sustenance.  Some of the farmers regretted their decision to move to the Steppe, because hunter gatherers sometimes killed their animals or stole them, leaving the farmers totally dependent on what crops they could grow on the Steppe.

​Then nomads from the north, after stealing animals, instead of fencing them in, herded them about on the Steppe, in the valley of the Lower Volga River near the Caspian Sea. The nomadic habits of these people and the needs of their animals often caused these people to herd their animals south, into the Caucasus Mountains and then further south, into Anatolia, where they found farmers growing grains and other crops.

Horses for sport and the legend of Pegasus

Donkeys were domesticated in northern Africa, where they were used for carrying goods; and onagers were domesticated in the Middle East, where they were 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 or as domesticated as onagers.

Once trained (again, by persuasion and force) a horse could be ridden, and such horses were so highly valued that they entered legend as the story of Pegasus, the ideal horse. This story miraculously appears in both Anatolian and Greek literature, indicating that the breeding of horses must have had a much longer history than generally recognized.

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 or drawing wagons.

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The rider would try to signal it to do whatever was desired but 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.

The cost of buying, keeping  and breeding semi-wild horses would have been high, and only the rich could have indulged in it, and injuries from such a sport could only have been detected in the fossil record for a later period, after horse riding had become commonplace. This is another reason to believe that this sport was ancient indeed.

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Riding horses in this fashion was 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 cells led to a prevalence of haemochromatosis among animal herders.  In haemochromatosis the circulatory system becomes so overloaded with red blood cells that the oxygen that the cells carry is toxic.

The tradition of cultivating and demonstrating a rapport between horse and rider has extended into the Twentieth Century, as witnessed by horseback riding as a hobby, steeplechases (in which people still break necks) and dressage, in which horses perform ballet movements.

The Anatolian and Yamnaya versions of the Proto-Indo European language

Those nomads on the verges of the Caucasus Mountains, just south of the Lower Volga region, came into contact with the farmers of Anatolia. After trading with them, animal products for farm products, intermarriages began to take place between the two peoples, began, and many of the animal herders took up farming themselves, mostly in combination with animal herding.  These early part-time farmers of the Caucuses spoke an Anatolian version of the early Indo European language, known to linguists as the Proto-Indo European language.

But other animal herders had broken off from those who foraged their animals in the basin of the Lower Volga River and moved to the west, where they absorbed the les numerous hunter-gatherers in that region, north of the Black Sea.  These other animal herders are known to archaeologists as the Yamnaya, and the language that they spoke is also known to linguists as the Proto-Indo European language, and this version became the basis for al of those Indo European languages that are spoken today.

The Yamnaya and the Mycenean Greks

Some of the Yamnaya moved still further west and south, into the Greek mainland, where they gave rise to the Mycenean Greeks.  The Mycenean Greeks created their own written language by copying the pictographs and syllabary (with some modifications) that the Minoans used for their written language; in other words, the Minoans taught the Greeks to read and write.  The Greeks later returned the favor by conquering and subjugating the Minoans.

The written version of the Mycenean Greek language has been found on clay tablets, both on the Greek mainland and on Crete.  This written language, known to archaeologists and linguists as Linear B, was an archaic version of Classic Greek, and is closer to the Proto-Indo European language spoken by the Yamnaya than any other written language.  (Linear A, the written version of the language that was spoken by the ancient Minoans, is largely undeciphered.)

The language spoken by the Mycenean Greeks was ancestral to the languages spoken by later Greeks, and the Mycenean Greeks also passed on many stories to them, such as stories of the Trojan War, as recorded by Homer.  The story of Pegasus, the ideal horse, was among the stories passed on, and this shows that the story was ancient, indeed, because a somewhat different version was found in Anatolia, in an Anatolian Indo European language, and the Anatolian version was the older of the two stories by several hundred years.  The Greek versions were written in classical Greek, which didn't exist until after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization.

The dueling Pegasus stories demonstrate that people on the steppe were using horses for sport before ancestors of the Yamnaya split from the steppe nomads of the Lower Volga Valley.

The Yamnaya on the Pontic Steppe continued to interbreed with hunter gatherers, often absorbing females into their ranks and leaving males, who owned no cattle or other animals, to survive by hunting wild animals.  Perhaps this is why the Yamnaya population grew rapidly and why it split into multiple subgroups.  Some of these subgroups started drifting to the west, and brought Indo European languages into Europe.

Linguists have concluded that the language spoken by the Yamnaya was not exactly the same as the language of the people they had left behind in the Lower Volga Valley, because all of the archaic Anatolian Indo European languages had archaisms in their grammar which were not retained in the Indo European languages derived from the spoken language of the Yamnaya.

Consequently, as linguists have tried to understand the ancient language from which all Indo European languages have evolved, they have had to construct two versions of it:  an archaic version which evolved into the early Anatolian Indo European language and another version which was theoretically spoken by the Yamnaya, after they had split from the steppe people of the Lower Volga Valley and moved to the west, to the region that lay to the north of the Greek mainland.

While the language that was spoken by the Yamnaya was the basis of al modern Indo European languages, the Anatolian version of the Proto-Indo European language was the basis for many languages that emerged in Anatolia after the Black Death arrived.  These languages are known to us only from written versions of languages that are now dead:  Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, Carian, Palaic and Hittite.  We know about these ancient languages only because linguists have deciphered their written versions.

The Black Death

As pastoralists moved back and forth along the steppes some of them stumbled into trouble in South Asia because bubonic plague was endemic among burrowing rodents in the southern foothills of the Himalaya Mountains. The rodents were infested with fleas that caried the deadly disease.

The pastoralists were not greatly affected by the disease, but they caried it with them as they moved across the steppes, transmitting the fleas and their deadly cargo to various rodent species along the way.

When the disease reached Anatolia and was transmitted to rodents there the human population of Anatolia was virtually wiped out, and the pastoralists moved into Central Anatolia. Many of them took up farming. As a result of this exchange of populations, Indo European languages came to be spoken throughout almost al of Anatolia.

The Black Death in Europe

The nomadic pastoralists had also driven their flocks and herds to the west, but they had been pushed out of western Europe as the farming population had increased.  It was only in northern Scandinavia where they were able to drive their animals as far as the western sea.

But in later times pastoralists brought the Black Death across the continent, and when it reached western Europe the entire population collapsed, and then land lay fallow over an immense territory that stretched from southern Scandinavia through present-day Germany and most of France to southern France.  The land was occupied only by a few nomadic herders until new people came in from the south -- from southern France and from Iberia.  It took two hundred years for the land to again become fully occupied.

Cattle herders in Britain

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Domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep were brought to Britain by farmers, perhaps as early as 9,000 years ago by descendants of Anatolian farmers who had established colonies in North Africa, the Balkan Peninsula, the Italian Peninsula and the Iberian Peninsula.  Very small numbers of these early farmers found their way to the Isle of Britain, but those who did brought their animals with them.

By 5,000 years ago the people in the Preseli HillsPreseli Hills in what is now Wales had largely given up hunting and gathering; they mostly just herded about the domesticated animals that they had acquired from the farmers.  The animals that they herded about, and sometimes fenced in, included sheep, pigs and cattle.  They did little farming because their territory was generally not well suited for farming.

Herded animals require much more land than farm crops, so these animal herders soon began to look far afield for grazing land that was not already occupied by farmers.  The ex-hunter gatherers found it in the hills of Devon as well as on Salisbury Plain, and even as far afield as the highlands of Scotland.

These animal herders were intolerant of lactose, so they milked their sheep and made yogurt out of the milk.  They slaughtered and butchered most of the pigs young, while the meat was tender, and likewise slaughtered calves that were only a year old.

The meat of cattle had been allowed to mature was very tough, because they had been cross-bred with native aurochs, so when they died their carcasses were fed to young pigs that were being readied for early slaughter.

The cattle herders generally removed the internal organs of mature cattle first, before feeding the rest to the pig.  They liked the fatty tissue around internal organs and ate it raw.

These tribesmen were very warlike, and this helped them to spread into new areas.  They believed that the primordial rhythms of the earth were a constant struggle between good and evil and that life and death, light and darkness were closely associated with this struggle.  The sun itself was at the heart of this struggle.  Every day the sun rose again to challenge the dark forces of the night, and every year, at the winter solstice, at the urging of priests, rose their voices in unison, beseeching the sun to again challenge the forces of darkness, so that vegetation would grow.  Animal herders of Salisbury Plain were joined by others from more distant places like the hills of Devon and of Preseli to take part in the winter solstice ceremonies at Stonehenge and around that time there were massive slaughters of calves and pigs to feed those who came, and older cattle were slaughtered to feed the pigs.

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The Trackway and the Ridgeway Route

The ground at Salisbury Plain is chalky and the substrate is almost solid chalk that extends down to a great depth.  When rain comes the water quickly soaks into the chalky ground, leaving the surface dry, so vegetation is sparce.  Moreover, there is little organic material in the soil, and all of this means that crops do not generally grow well on Salisbury Plain.  This unsuitability for agriculture is probably what led to the takeover of the region by animal herders.

Once they had moved into the region the animal herders realized that Salisbury Plain was ideally located for trading with the outside world.  There is a trackway running along high ground through Salisbury Plain, and in ancient times this trackway connected to an ancient pathway that is known as the Ridgeway Route that led ultimately to the Wessex coast.

Around the time of the winter solstice it was difficult for the animal herders to sustain large herds of cattle because forage was not sufficient to sustain the cattle at that time of year and the cattle needed to be fed such farm products as legumes.  Therefore, part of the herd was driven along the Ridgeway Route toward the coast, and the cattle were traded for salt and other products.  Thus Salisbury Plain was particularly important to the cattle herders, and cattle were driven clear from the homeland of the tribe in the Preseli Hills, and from there most of these cattle were driven along the Ridgeway route toward the coast.

Pilgrims along the Ridgeway Route

As the animal herders became acquainted with farmers and others with whom they traded, the people with whom they traded became aware of the ceremonies at Stonehenge, and were greatly impressed.  Each year more and more pilgrims came along the Ridgeway Route to take part in the ceremonies, and while the pilgrims were a source of profit for them, and a way to get rid of excess livestock, the animal herders looked around for some way to control them.

The tribesmen decided to create an alternative site to Stonehenge, which at that time consisted of simply an altar stone, a surrounding ditch and a roadway by which people could come to the site, so they decided to creat an alternative site which the pilgrims woul reach before coming to Stonehenge.  If the pilgrims chose to come to this other site, they wouldn't interfere with the ceremonies at Stonehenge.

This strategy worked, to a degree, and in the course of the next several hundred years the alternative ceremonies at a nearby site at Avebury competed with those at Stonehenge, and the Avebury site was repeatedly modified in various ways in order to satisfy the pilgrims.  Still, some of the pilgrims continued to bypass Avebury in favor of Stonehenge.  Those who did were arrested, punished, and sent back to warn others.

Silbury Hill

Eventually, so many pilgrims started coming that they overwhelmed the guards who tried to stop them form coming to Stonehenge, and the herders looked around for some other way to stop them.  They knew that some of the pilgrims were interested in sacrificing animals at high places in order to appease the gods, so they started building a Ziggurat-like platform on which such sacrifices could be carried out.

They transported very large boulders to a site that was readily accessible to the pilgrims, and instead of immediately sending trespassers at Stonehenge back they set the prisoners to work at digging up chalky soil inside a circle of the boulders to form a base of a man-made hill that is known to us as Silbury Hill.

s the population expanded into Devon, Salisbury Plain and elsewhere the tribe became broken into several segments in their expanded territories, so every year, shortly before the winter solstice, far-flung segments of the tribe came together to celebrate their unity by performing ceremonies, participating in processions, and feasting together.

A site was selected for major processions and a roadway was laid out from the site to nearby living quarters and a feasting area.  This roadway lay in the opposite direction from where the sun set at the winter solstice.

The point at which the marchers were to enter the circular parade ground was marked by a huge timber, set upright in the ground.  Another huge timber was set upright at the opposite edge of the parade ground so that a line drawn between the two timbers would bisect the circle, and would be aligned with the winter solstice.

Competing parade grounds

In the course of time the upright timbers rotted and toppled, and there was some discussion about replacing with stone markers, but tribal leaders in the Preseli Hills had a better idea:  They wanted to return the celebration to the homeland of the tribe, and they knew where beautiful stone markers could be found nearby.  These were from natural rock formations from which beautiful tall Bluestones could be removed and transported rather easily to a local site.  These Bluestones, unlike the timbers, would not rot.

Accordingly, the Bluestones were removed from their rock formations, transported, and set upright.  Moreover, more Bluestones were added to mark the paths that the marchers were to take.

This alternative parade ground served its purpose for almost 500 years, but as the tribe kept growing in size, and parts of the tribe as far afield as Scotland joined in, it was decided to again build a parade ground on Salisbury Plain.

Return to Salisbury Plain

Transport of the Bluestones to Salisbury plain, even with the help of cattle, was arduous, and must have taken several years.  We know something about this transport because archaeologists have identified the remains of one  the remains of one of the cows that had helped to transport the Bluestones.

Since cows and bulls were generally slaughtered young, the ex-hunter gatherers did not castrate young bulls to make them more amenable, and since castration of male calves was not practiced, the animal herders had no oxen, and cows were used for dragging bluestones 180 to 200 miles from the site in Wales to the site on Salisbury Plain.  Archaeologists learned this by analyzing the isotopes in a fossilized tooth extracted from the jawbone of aged cow that had been utilized for the arduous task of dragging the stones from Wales to Salisbury Plain -- oxen were apparently unavailable.

The cow had given birth to calves en route so she must have had access to uncastrated mature males.  Calves could have run alongside their mothers, and perhaps even helped to drag the bluestones, until they were ready to be slaughtered.

The celebrations

After feasting on the appointed day a procession would be organized and at sunset it would proceed toward the parade site, facing the sunset.  After parading through the site in a prearranged manner and performing ceremonies, they would march back the way they had come.

As the number of marchers increased, year by year, the milling crowd often became confused as they entered the central part of the parade ground, where ceremonies were performed, so more great stones, much larger and bulkier than the Bluestones, were added so that the marchers could more easily orient themselves.  Some of these great boulders were chipped out of the local rock formations and shaped so that they could be stood upright, while others were sized and shaped so as to serve as lintels which connected the standing boulders so as to stabilize them.  Still others were free-standing, and one huge boulder, transported clear from Scotland, was placed in the center of the parade ground to serve as an alter.

The trackway

Salisbury Plain was particularly important to the animal herders, because there was a convenient trackway along a chalk ridge connecting it to other parts of England, including the Norfolk coast, and cattle were sometimes driven over this route to places where the cattle could be exchanged for salt and other products.

This trade attracted pilgrims who traveled in the opposite direction and wanted to take part in the processions of the cattle herders at Stonehenge, and in order to prevent this a comparable site was constructed near the trackway to attract the pilgrims to alternative processions in which they could participate.  Those who insisted on interfering with the ceremonies at Stonehenge or trespassing on the grounds were often arrested and put to work on Silbury Hill.

Silbury Hill was initially intended as a platform on which sacrifices could be made, of pigs or cattle which would be purchased by the pilgrims for sacrifice.  The pilgrims sometimes purchased the animals for feasts of their own but showed little interest in taking part in ceremonies on Silbury Hill.  Still, the construction itself proved useful as a a way to keep people from interfering with the alternative ceremonies at Stonehenge, so construction continued on Silbury Hill.

Initial construction of Silbury Hill involved transporting gravel from the nearby River Kennet, piling it up in a mound and reinforcing it with sarsen boulders -- carrying the gravel and moving the boulders from their initial locations involved a significant amount of slave labor.  Chalk and rubble were piled on top, and stakes were driven into the earth around the edges to help contain the whole mess.

After the idea of sacrificing on the platform was abandoned the miscreants were set to work digging a ditch around the mound and piling more chalk and dirt on top until the mound itself flowed into the ditch.  A larger ditch was then dug, and then a larger one, and this process continued for at least a hundred years, and maybe much longer (with some hiatuses).

Incidentally, the cattle herders who herded cattle along the trackway, which ran all the way to the Norfolk coast, might have come into contact with the Beaker people, who were moving into Britain in small numbers and also herded cattle.

The Beaker People

Prior to the arrival of Beaker people in Britain, Beaker communities had spread across large parts of Europe and North Africa.  They were named for the flaring beaker shape of their drinking vessels, but unlike other people with characteristic pottery they used a wide variety of motifs to decorate the surfaces of their pottery -- different motifs in different places.  Indeed, they may 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, the characteristic Beaker shape of their large drinking vessels, and their drinking habits at communal (male-only) feasts.  (They drank beer and/or mead at those feasts.)

The Beaker people originated on the Iberian Peninsula, or perhaps across the channel in North Africa, and from there Beaker communities hop-scotched into central Europe.  Beaker communities often spread out from trading posts that enterprising Beaker people established in order to more easily trade with people in new locations; if the pioneers were successful, they would be followed by others.

Like the early Yamnaya, Beaker men often took local non-Beaker brides, but Beaker women seldom married into non-Beaker clans.  This left non-Beaker men out in the cold, so that the populations of Beaker communities grew rapidly while non-Beaker populations stagnated.

The English Channel had kept Yamnaya-related animal herders from invading Britain, but it presented less of a challenge to the Beaker people, who used seagoing ships to carry on trade up and down the Atlantic coast.  Still, the inhabitants of the Isle of Britain had little to trade, and the Beaker people mostly ignored Britain.

But in the lowlands of what is now Belgium, western Germany and the Netherlands the Bell Beaker people came into contact with hunter-gatherers who had been somewhat protected from encroachment on their lands by wetlands that were too wet to walk across and too shallow to sail across.  Moreover, the boggy terrain was generally unsuitable for farming.

These hunter gatherers had taken to to herding about cattle that had been brought to the region by farmers, and many of the descendants of local hunter-gatherers were wealthy owners of herds of cattle.  This presented an opportunity for the Beaker people, who began trading luxury goods in return for animal hides, garments made from animal hides, and other possessions of the cattle ranchers, and soon a mixed race of the two peoples emerged in the Low Countries.

Many descendants of this mixed race supplemented their trading practices with cattle ranching, and these cattle ranchers realized that there was plenty of good grazing ground available in Britain; so some cattle-ranching Beakers who would otherwise have had a hard time acquiring land on which to herd cattle paid ship owners to ferry them across the Channel, along with some livestock.

Like the cattle herders who had built Stonehenge these Beakers herded their cattle about, but unlike the builders of Stonehenge they didn't have to worry much about their cattle trampling the fields of farmers -- the Beakers had better weaponry than the natives of Britain, including superior bows and arrows and weapons made of copper.

Another advantage that the Beakers had was that it was easy for them to obtain brides from among the farming population of Britain, and this gave them access to land.  Whereas the builders of Stonehenge avoided interbreeding with the farmers (mostly women) who owned the farmland -- the animal herders didn't want to become farmers -- Beaker men eagerly sought out farming women as brides, in order to obtain land.  Consequently, genetic inheritance of the farming population gradually changed, until it was was 80% or 90% derived from the Beakers and only about 10% derived from the original hunter gatherers of the Isle of Britain.

While there is little racial continuity between the original farming population of ancient Britain and the current population of Britain, there seems to have been a great deal of continuity along lines of descent that runs from Cheddar Man, who lived west of where Stonehenge was built (but 4,000 years earlier) -- through the builders of Stonehenge -- through the ancient Welch Silurian tribe -- and ending with the Welsh kingdom of Gwent.

The real King Arthur

Incidentally, the real King Arthur most likely came from this same tribe of ancient warriors.  These people often had blue or greenish blue eyes and generally had dark curly hair and very dark complexions.

Later stories and mentions of Arthur were extracted from earlier works that no longer exist, but aberrant spellings in later works can indicate that passages in later works had ben copied from manuscripts that were written earlier.  This is the case with an annal whose manuscript dates to around 1100 AD but discuses the events of 537.  Britons were fighting of Saxon invaders at that time, and the anal discuses Arthur's great victory in that year. Aberrant spellings in the text indicates that the passages that discus Arthur were copied from some document that was actually written in the Sixth Century.

Circumstantial evidence also points to a military leader (most likely a king or prince) who was famous about that time:  In the hundred years that followed 537 AD many kings named their sons Arthur, but the name had ben unknown before that time.  Perhaps the name was suddenly popular because it was generally known that a great military leader bore that name.  

Before then neither royalty nor common people are known to have gone by that name, and the first known mention of the name is in an epic Welsh poem about Arthur's career as a military leader.  This epic poem, being of Welsh origin, points to the likelihood that Arthur might actually have ben connected to Gwent or to another of the Welsh kingdoms.

537 AD was also about when the Justinian Plague arrived in Britain, and the same passages that mention Arthur also mention a plague in Britain and Ireland..  In fact, the Saxons might have ben weakened by the Black Death before Arthur confronted them.  Arthur might have traveled fast and light and depended more on freshly butchered animals to fed his army (rather than carrying bags of grain) so he was less affected by the plague.

Mining of tin in Devon and Cornwall and copper in Wales

As the Beaker population expanded and moved inland the cattle drivers who had spread out from the Preseli Hills of Wales had no choice but to either meld into the Beaker p;opulation or to retreat to their homeland in Wales.

In Devon Beakers found lots of land where they could pasture their animals, but they also found something else that was very interesting:  deep placer deposits of lead, cadmium and other metals lying about on the surface.  Metallurgists who were called in were very excited, because some of the deposits contained tin, which was very valuable

Exploring further afield the metallurgists found more deep deposits of tin in Cornwall as well as substantial deposits of copper in Wales.  They knew that by mixing copper with tin they could make high quality bronze without the health consequences of smelting copper with arsenic -- the fumes produced by the smelting of arsenic were extremely poisonous.

Tin was in high demand throughout the ancient world because most deposit were in very thin layers, and those thin deposits were scattered widely.  However, transport of the precious metal was very slow; even the Beakers possessed a very small merchant fleet, because trade relations were unstable, and owners of the ships that carried goods often lost their ships instead of reaping a profit.  However, over the course of hundreds of years British tin eventually found its way in large quantities to the European mainland and finally to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Britain was later invaded by Celts, but this had little effect on the population in general, either genetically or socially, because the Celts constituted a relatively small population of overlords in Britain, and 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.

The Sintashta culture

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The original Yamnaya culture, which had expanded so rapidly, was succeeded by a plethora of nomadic animal-herding cultures which rapidly expanded into Europe. but at the eastern end of their range they came into intense conflict with an offshoot of the nomadic herding cultures that lived in more forested and mountainous regions near the southern end of the Ural Mountains, and supplemented their herding practices by raising crops, primarily grains.  These semi-nomads had to move their animals seasonally, because the winters were very cold and the summers were very warm, but the farming population lived in settled villages near their crops.

The villages of these semi-nomads were often subject to raids by a neighboring people who also herded cattle on the Volga-Ural Steppe and wanted to invade their territory.  These neighbors couldn't easily move from place to place, being partially dependent on crops that they grew, but they were overpopulated and wanted to expand their territory.  Their dense population posed a threat to the nomads because they could attack in such numbers.  The nomads therefore looked around for ways to counter them.

First, the nomads needed quantities of superior copper weapons, and copper was in short supply in the Steppe, so they started to mine copper ores, which were available in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, but hadn't been much utilized, and they developed the techniques needed for smelting, casting and working the metal to produce axe heads, arrow heads, spearheads and knives.  They were also quick to recognize the possibilities of utilizing horse-drawn chariots to carry skilled charioteers into battle, and they began to build lightweight chariots with spoked wheels. These appurtenances of war and the means of producing them are hallmarks of the Shintashta culture, which produced the finest chariots to be built anywhere, up to that time.

The Sintashta also needed superior horses to pull their chariots into battle, so they became horse breeders.  They bred horses that were more docile and trainable, that were better able to tolerate stress and had better endurance if they needed to travel long distances or keep moving in battle.  Their horses had stronger backs so they could carry heavy loads, and they were highly prized for horseback riding, for pulling chariots, and for pulling plows.

Metallurgy and production processes for making things out of copper and bronze could not be carried out on the open steppe, nor could finely crafted carriages be made without proper facilities and equipment.  The Sintashta craftsmen did not need to maintain high mobility while they worked, so a large part of the population retreated to fortified villages that were protected by walls, moats and watch towers even while Sintashta herdsmen herded animals about in order to take advantage of greener pastures.

The sophisticated designs of their chariots were not matched by any of their contemporaries, and chariots with their innovations were used as war machines throughout the Middle East, in Egypt and in Europe.   Chariots were introduced into Britain by the Beaker people, but it is not known who they were at war with.  Perhaps they only used chariots to carry messages, goods and people, or perhaps they were at war with the Celts, who brought kingship to Britain.

The Vedas and the Brahmins

While the Proto Indo European language was diverging into a plethora of local languages in Anatolia, on the Balkan Peninsula and elsewhere special-purpose languages were emerging from centers of power such as Rome and the Sintashtra. villages of the southern Ural mountains.  At Rome, Latin emerged, and it gradually turned into a purely written language.  The languages of Italy continued to evolve into the modern Italian language while Latin took a more conservative trajectory.

Similarly, Vedic Sanskrit emerged from the language of the Sintashtra or from some other language of the Pontic Steppe, and it was preserved by another method -- at first by committing rituals to memory and later by putting memorized rituals and priestly discourses into a written form.  This is why Latin and Sanskrit were not ancestral to any living languages -- Latin was purely a written language while Sanskrit rituals and priestly discourses were committed to memory, and  the memorized rituals and discourses were later put into a written form.  Neither language was used by ordinary people in their daily lives.

Indo-Aryan migrations

The Indo-Aryans were nomadic Steppe people but they designed chariots that were suitable for their own use:  They produced chariots that could be assembled and disassembled easily, so that they could be built and repaired while the herders moved from place to place.  Moreover, the chariots were sturdy and yet lightweight so that they were suitable for travel over rough ground.  The Indo-Aryans also fabricated bronze weaponry from bronze that they obtained from the Sintashta and from other local sources or from trade networks.

With these chariots and with bronze weapons they moved to the east, into Central Asia, and then through mountain passes into South Asia, where they established themselves, forming several small kingdoms in today's northwest India.  They brought with them priests whose rites and ceremonies exalted gods whose origins were truly ancient.  We know that because of the resemblance of their gods to those of Europe.  On the Italian Peninsula Jupiter, also known as Jove, was considered the personification of the sky and of thunder while Mars was the personification of war.  Further north, among the Germanic tribes, Odin was the personification of war and victory and known to be careful of the fate of dead warriors, whom he welcomes into Valhalla.  Moreover, Odin was also the god of magic, poetry and prophesy.  Another Germanic god, Thor, was the personification of thunder.

By the time Indo-Aryan tribes had moved into South Asia, most of the civilizations in Europe and the Middle East had developed written versions of their languages, but no such written version existed for the Indo-Aryan invaders of South Asia.  This did not stop the Indo-Aryan priests, the forerunners of the Brahmins, from creating four huge liturgical compendia, known as Vedas, consisting of the rituals and ceremonies which the priests performed, as well as songs or verses that praised their spirit-gods such as their god of war (which was also a god of rain) as well as personifications of fire, of different aspects of the sun, of dawn and of storms.  There were abstract personifications as well -- of friendship, moral authority and kingship.  Feminists might be interested in knowing that even in these intensely male-oriented herder societies a goddess was considered to be the source of speech -- an infant, whether male or female learns speech largely from its mother.

The liturgical collection that held all of this were oral, meaning that the priests had to memorize it all and take steps to check their memories to make sure that nothing was left out or changed.  Moreover, the oldest parts of the oldest Veda, the Rig Veda, were most likely composed about 5,500 years ago, and the Rig Veda was not put into written form until about 5,000 years after that.  Those parts, which are voiced in precise meters, like poetry, are supposed to represent things like entreaties to the gods, so they probably had meaning at one time, but today nobody knows what they mean.  Still, these ancient mantras are recited, in the belief that the sounds themselves possess some magic.

Today, the Vedas, together with much larger multifarious collections of related material, constitute the liturgical basis for the many flavors of Hinduism, as well as a number of other religions, including Jainism and Buddhism.  While Jainism is mostly limited to South Asia, Hinduism has spread into parts of Indonesia and Buddhism has spread throughout much of East Asia.

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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Aggressive war was often an instrument by which the Yamnaya-related peoples spread their language and culture into much of Eurasia, and the same glorification of aggressive war inspired Greek storytellers to repeat stories of the Trojan War.  It also helped to inspire the war itself.

One wonders, however, if the population turnovers that the poets of the steppes attributed to War actually result resulted from outbreaks of plague.

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The steppe nomads left their mark and then vanished

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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?

The Brahmins were descendants of bureaucrats hired by the new rulers to run their  governments whereas the animal herders were not much attracted to administrative work, and went back to the steppes, as nomads will!

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The animal herders who lived six thousand years ago in the Volga Valley, north of the Caspian Sea. have left their mark on the world, including their language, which evolved into hundreds of languages including Latin, Greek, English, German, Russian, Hindi and Sanskrit.  Elements of their ideology show up in the Greek, Roman and Norse gods.  Mars, for example, was worshipped by the Romans as the god of war.

These ideologies were quite different from the ancient Palaic writings of Anatolia, which became the sacred writings of the Hittites, even though they were written in a language that was foreign to the Hittites themselves.  These writings tell us about the religion inherited from pre-Yamnaya people who once herded cattle in the Lower Volga Valley.

Syncretism between Hinduism and Islam

In Sout Asia he Vedas were recorded in Sanskrit, which was the earli