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

Wagons and horseback riding made possible a new, more mobile form of pastoralism. With a wagon full of tents and supplies, herders could take their herds out of the river valleys and live for weeks or months out in the open steppes between the major rivers—the great majority of the Eurasian steppes. Land that had been open and wild became pasture t

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.

Between 3700 and 3500 BCE the first cities in the world appeared among the irrigated lowlands of Mesopotamia. Old temple centers like Uruk and Ur had always been able to attract thousands of laborers from the farms of southern Iraq for building projects, but we are not certain why they began to live around the temples permanently (figure 12.8). Thi

Cattle herders would have been particularly well suited to manage horses because cattle and horse bands both follow the lead of a dominant female. Cowherds already knew they needed only to control the lead cow to control the whole herd, and would easily have transferred that knowledge to controlling lead mares. Males presented a similar management

From this time forward the people of the Eurasian steppes remained directly connected with the civilizations of Central Asia, South Asia, and Iran, and, through intermediaries, with China. The arid lands that occupied the center of the Eurasian continent began to play a role in transcontinental economies and politics.

Avestan Iranian was the language of the Avesta, the holiest text of Zorastrianism. The oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, probably were composed by Zoroaster (the Greek form of the name) or by Zarathustra (the original Iranian form) himself. Zarathustra was a religious reformer who lived in eastern Iran, judging from the places he named, proba

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 organization of migrating groups depends on the identity and social connections of the scouts (who select the target destination); the social organization of information sharing (which determines who gets access to the scouts’ information); transportation technology (cheaper and more effective transport makes migration easier); the targeting of