The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowled

As the linguist Edward Sapir observed, “The complete vocabulary of a language may indeed be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests, and occupations that take up the attention of the community.”

If we can combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of archaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usual limitations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge of these particular ancestors.

Migration was used by archaeologists before World War II as a simple explanation for any kind of change observed in prehistoric cultures: if pot type A in level one was replaced by pot type B in level two, then it was a migration of B-people that had caused the change. That simple assumption was proven to be grossly inadequate by a later generation

By applying such rules to all the cognates, linguists have been able to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European sequence of phonemes, *k’tom, that could have developed into all the attested phonemes in all the attested daughter forms. The Proto-Indo-European root *k’tom is the residue of a successful comparison—it is the proof that the daughter terms bei

The meaning of wheel is given additional support by the fact that it has an Indo-European etymology, like the root for *k’tom. It was a word created from another Indo-European root. That root was *kwel-, a verb that meant “to turn.” So *kwékwlos is not just a random string of phonemes reconstructed from the cognates for wheel; it meant “the thing t

The Mitanni were famous as charioteers, and, in the oldest surviving horse-training manual in the world, a Mitanni horse trainer named Kikkuli (a Hurrian name) used many Old Indic terms for technical details, including horse colors and numbers of laps.

Forager languages were more apt to decline in the face of agricultural immigration. Farmers had a higher birth rate; their settlements were larger, and were occupied permanently. They produced food surpluses that were easier to store over the winter.

The female bloodline of modern domesticated horses shows extreme diversity. Traits inherited through the mitochondrial DNA, which passes unchanged from mother to daughter, show that this part of the bloodline is so diverse that at least seventy-seven ancestral mares, grouped into seventeen phylogenetic branches, are required to account for the gene

The Yamnaya horizon is the visible archaeological expression of a social adjustment to high mobility—the invention of the political infrastructure to manage larger herds from mobile homes based in the steppes.