NOMADIC HERDERS

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 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 on the Pontic Steppe

Donkeys were domesticated in northern Africa, where they were used for carrying goods; and onagers had been 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 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 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.

Anatolian Indo European languages

Those nomads on the verges of the Caucasus Mountains began trading animal products for grain, and while they did so they learned the languages, myths, religions, practices and customs of the farmers.  Some of them even began to grow crops themselves, in order to supplement the meat and fat that they obtained from slaughtered animals.  Some of the nomads even ventured deeper into Anatolia, looking for land that was poor for farming but good for herding of cattle, sheep and goats.  As the herders filtered further and further into Anatolia they interbred with the farmers and the population that emerged was of mixed ancestry -- about 90% of their DNA was from the steppe and 10% was from the original farmers, but Indo European languages were spoken by the mixed-ancestry population that emerged.  This mixed-race people picked up and began to tell many of the stories told by the people of the Steppe; the people of the Steppe were good storytellers.

Archaeologists have found written versions of some of the Indo European languages of Anatolia and given them names:  Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, Carian, Palaic and Hittite.  Embedded in the writings were stories that had been told by the people of the Steppe, and among those stories was the legend of Pegasus, the ideal horse.

The Anatolian languages were not carried to the islands of the Aegean Sea, because those islands had already been occupied by Europeans -- primarily fishermen and shellfish gatherers until they adopted Neolithic practices that were brought to the islands from Anatolia by fishermen or other seafarers.

The Yamnaya

The Yamnaya were descendants of animal herders who had broken off from those in the Lower Volga Valley and moved to the west, north of the Black Sea, where their population grew rapidly.  Then, 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 copied the pictographs and syllabary (with some modifications) that the Minoans used for their written language, in order to produce a written version of their own 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 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 passed on to the Anatolians by people of the Steppe more than a thousand years earlier.  The two stories were somewhat different but the name of the horse was the same in the Anatolian writings as in the Greek myth that we are familiar with.

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 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.

Salisbury Plain

Domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep were brought to Britain by farmers, perhaps as long ago as 6,000 years ago, and some of the animals were then acquired by hunter gatherers still living in the rugged country of northern Wales.  Those hunter gatherers cross-bred the cattle with native aurochs, and they herded the cross-bred cattle about in Wales.

The cattle and pigs were slaughtered young, so their meat would be tender.  Male calves were mostly castrated and slaughtered young, along with most of the young heifers, and most of the pigs were also slaughtered young.  The meat of animals that had been allowed to fully mature was very tough, so instead of cooking and eating it the ex-hunter gatherers usually fed the meat to pigs that were being prepared for early slaughter.

These ex-hunter gatherers liked to consume fatty tissue around internal organs of the slaughtered animals raw, especially at feasts, before cooking the meat itself.

The population of a well-fed tribe in Wales, after they began to consume beef and pork from domesticated animals and fermented milk from sheep expanded so fast that they began to look far afield for grazing ground, and they found many places where their cattle and sheep could graze -- where the ground was unsuitable for farming but good enough for grazing, like the hills of Devon or the chalky ground of Salisbury Plain.  This resulted in the tribe being 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.

After feasting on the appointed day, if there was not too much cloud cover, 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.

There was always some confusion as people marched along a convoluted path through the site -- they marched through the site as if they were hunting for some quarry, and the procession was broken into regional contingents that took different paths.  In order to mark the paths that people should take, tall majestic bluestones were gathered from a nearby rock outcropping and set upright at strategic points.

This was fine, but as the tribal population continued to expand they decided that the annual procession and feast should be held at a more central location, and a site at Salisbury Plain was selected.  (181.7 miles by to the southeast of the site at Wales by road.)

A ditch was dug around the circular site at Salisbury Plain -- the purpose of the ditch was to keep unauthorized persons from trespassing on the grounds and to create an embankment inside the circular ditch that would help to orient the marchers (and keep them from falling into the ditch) -- and bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills in Wales and set upright at Stonehenge.  (In later times when leaders of delegations to Stonehenge died their ashes were sometimes transported to Stonehenge and buried there, so that they could again lead their delegations in the afterlife.

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, a gigantic man-made hill with no purpose.

The 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 labor.  Chalk and rubble were piled on top, and stakes were driven into the earth around the edges to help contain the whole mess.  The purpose of piling it so high was to make it visible from the trackway.

The misbehavior continued, in spite of the conspicuous punishment, so the miscreants were set to work digging a ditch around the growing mound and piling the 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).

At the estuaries along the Norfolk coast, the cattle herders might have come into contact with 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 -- until it occurred to some cattle-owning Beakers along the Netherlands coast that there was plenty of good grazing ground available in Britain, and Beakers 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 the farming population.  Unlike the builders of Stonehenge, they were not nomads (even though they herded cattle) and their better diets and lifestyle made them healthier than males of the farming population, and relatively rich.  Indeed, if they wanted to become farmers, they could obtain farmland by marrying a farmer's daughter who was in line to inherit farmland.

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.  The reason for this may have been that if a Beaker wanted to become a farmer, that was generally what he had to do, since he himself owned no land independently.

On the other hand, the cattle herders were undoubtedly much healthier than males in the farming population.  They were used to the hard work of herding cattle, and they were usually able to pay a substantial bride price in terms of precious metals or livestock.

Mining of tin in Devon and Cornwall

As the Beaker population increased along the Norfolk coast, and they ran out of available pasturage in that region, they moved inland, and some of them drove their cattle along the trackway to Salisbury Plain and then on to the hills of Devon, looking for fresh pasturage.

In Devon they found lots of land where they could pasture their animals alongside the indigenous herders, 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.

The coming of the Beakers and others to the Isle of Britain gradually brought about a drastic transformation in the genetic makeup of the people of Britain, but did not affect their society so drastically.  Even before movement into Britain of Celtic overlords the genetic makeup of the British population gradually changed until it was 90% from the predominantly Steppe-related ancestry that predominated on the Continent and only10% from the original British stock.

But 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

​

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, nor did the craftsmen need to maintain high mobility.  Although herdsmen continued to herd animals about in order to take advantage of greener pastures, a large part of the population retreated to fortified villages that were protected by walls, moats and watch towers, and the Sintashta culture was quite prosperous.

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 new waves immigrants coming from the mainland who brought kingships to Britain and constituted a new ruling class.

The poetry of steppe warriors

​

Like the Sinashta 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 the worship of Greek, Roman and Norse gods, and Zoroastrianism.  But of particular interest to us are the Vedas, poems that were composed by Yamnaya-related people and written down in Sanskrit.  Sanskrit was probably based on a writing system that was used by a warrior elite to send messages and then utilized for poems that expressed their ideology.

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.

​

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.

​

The steppe nomads left their mark and then vanished

​

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!

​

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.