2. Horseback riding shortened distances, so riders traveled farther than walkers. In addition to the conceptual changes in human geography this caused, riders gained two functional advantages. First, they could manage herds larger than those tended by pedestrian herders, and could move those larger herds more easily from one pasture to another. Any

The possible homeland locations can be narrowed further by identifying the neighbors. The neighbors of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European can be identified through words and morphologies borrowed between Proto-Indo-European and other language families.

Warfare, a powerful stimulus to social and political change, also shaped the Sintashta culture, for a heightened threat of conflict dissolves the old social order and creates new opportunities for the acquisition of power. Nicola DiCosmo has recently argued that complex political structures arose among steppe nomads in the Iron Age largely because

A real language lies behind reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, just as a real language lies behind any dictionary. And that language is a guide to the thoughts, concerns, and material culture of real people who lived in a definite region between about 4500 and 2500 BCE.

Feast-hosting behavior is the most common and consistently used avenue to prestige and power in tribal societies.

If people move across an ethno-linguistic frontier freely, then the frontier is often described in anthropology as, in some sense, a fiction. Is this just because it was not a boundary like that of a modern nation? Eric Wolf used this very argument to assert that the North American Iroquois did not exist as a distinct tribe during the Colonial

Many experts have suggested that horses were not ridden in warfare until after about 1500–1000 BCE, but they failed to differentiate between mounted raiding, which probably is very old, and cavalry, which was invented in the Iron Age after about 1000 BCE.38 Eneolithic tribal herders probably rode horses in inter-clan raids before 4000 BCE, but they

In Proto–Indo–European religion generally the chasm between gods and humans was bridged by the sanctity of oath–bound contracts and reciprocal obligations, so these were undoubtedly important tools regulating the daily behavior of the powerful toward the weak, at least for people who belonged under the social umbrella. Patron–client systems like

Access to the scouts’ information defines the pool of potential migrants. Studies have found that the first 10% of new migrants into a region is an accurate predictor of the social makeup of the population that will follow them. This restriction on information at the source produces two common behaviors: leapfrogging and chain migration. In