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

Woven woolen textiles are made from long wool fibers of a type that did not grow on wild sheep. Sheep with long wooly coats are genetic mutants bred just for that trait. If Proto-Indo-European contained words referring unequivocally to woven woolen textiles, then those words had to have entered Proto-Indo-European after the date when wool sheep wer

More cattle and sheep could be owned and controlled by riders than by pedestrian herders, which permitted a greater accumulation of animal wealth. Larger herds, of course, required larger pastures, and the desire for larger pastures would have caused a general renegotiation of tribal frontiers, a series of boundary conflicts. Victory in tribal warf

The guest-host relationship was bound by oaths and sacrifices so serious that Homer’s warriors, Glaukos and Diomedes, stopped fighting and presented gifts to each other when they learned that their grandfathers had shared a guest-host relationship. This mutual obligation to provide “hospitality” functioned as a bridge between social units (tribes,

Participation in long-distance trade, gift exchange, and a new set of cults requiring public sacrifices and feasting became the foundation for a new kind of social power. Stockbreeding is by nature a volatile economy. Herders who lose animals always borrow from those who still have them. The social obligations associated with these loans are instit

Perhaps the extraordinary nature of these objects was one of the reasons why they were buried with their owners rather than inherited. Limited use and circulation were common characteristics of objects regarded as “primitive valuables.”

The Indo-European problem can be solved today because archaeological discoveries and advances in linguistics have eaten away at problems that remained insoluble as recently as fifteen years ago. The lifting of the Iron Curtain after 1991 made the results of steppe research more easily available to Western scholars and created new cooperative archae

Frontiers can be envisioned as peaceful trade zones where valuables are exchanged for the mutual benefit of both sides, with economic need preventing overt hostilities, or as places where distrust is magnified by cultural misunderstandings, negative stereotypes, and the absence of bridging institutions.

Intermarriage is an often-repeated but not very convincing explanation for incremental changes in material culture. In this case, imported Criş-culture wives would be the vehicle through which Criş-culture pottery styles and foods should have appeared in Bug-Dniester settlements. But Warren DeBoer has shown that wives who marry into a foreign tribe

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