Horse domestication is a question intimately associated with the spread of Indo-European in the archaeology community, as it is widely assumed, and heavily intimated by the archaeological record, that the arrival of Indo-European communities brought horses and extensive horse use and domestication with them.
Horse DNA has now called this somewhat into question. There are four basic lineages of domestic horses, each corresponding to a specific geographic area: the Iberian horses, the Siberian horses, the Botai horses of Central Asia (what is now Kazakhstan) and a horse lineage of indeterminate geographical origin that is probably associated with the Sintashta culture, a Bronze Age culture that is descended mostly from Corded Ware antecedents and is the cultural root of the Andronovo horizon and probably associated with a very early divergence of the Indo-Iranian root stocks.
The Iberian and Siberian horse lineages are basically extinct, and have contributed nothing significant to modern horse lineages (although traces of them persisted into the Bronze Age) and the Botai horses, the first domesticated, actually seem to be the ancestors of only the "wild" Przewalski's horse. Which is actually feral instead of wild, if you want to be technical, and which also contributes essentially nothing to modern horse lineages.
So, if all modern horse lineages are descended from a single group, which is probably (although this still isn't known for sure) associated with the surprisingly late appearing Sintashta culture, what does that mean for Yamnaya and Corded Ware spread of the horse into Europe and elsewhere? Did they, in fact, bring all that much horse with them? Were the Corded Ware and Bell Beakers actually the ones who spread widespread horse usage to Europe or not?
There's even some suggestions (although I have a hard time thinking that they're entirely serious), especially given the fact that the Basque people are indistinguishable genetically from Iron Age Iberians, that the Bell Beakers actually brought the Basque language to Europe rather than the Indo-European languages, and the source of Indo-Europeans is still mysterious. This is rather farcical, in my opinion, but it seems to bewitch and mystify a lot of people right now, and this horse DNA data can be crowbarred into supporting such a point of view, with some difficulty. If the Vasconic substrate hypothesis was not to be taken seriously when applied to the Mesolithic and early Neolithic, and can hardly be less absurd when moved forward into the early Bronze Age or even later; in fact, it is obviously much more absurd. But things are a bit murkier now rather that more clear. As Eurogenes points out, the Nordic Bronze Age, for instance, (almost certainly the speakers of the Germanic Parent Language) have a number of interesting factors: strong genetic continuity to the past, going back to at least the earliest Corded Ware incursion into the area, but with strong links genetically to those who were there before (given the theory that Germanic formed as the imposition of a Corded Ware proto-Satem language over a non-Indo-European native language that had less genetic turnover than elsewhere in Europe, which was then further superimposed with a Bell Beaker or Urnfield early Centum language) this shouldn't be surprising. However, Eurogenes also points out the striking cultural connections between the Nordic Bronze Age and Sintashta, especially their use of the Divine Twins and solar disk iconography.
None of this proves anything, but it does posit, and then offer tantalizing hints, of some kind of broader connection between places as disparate as southern Scandinavia and Central and South Asia that are still in evidence in the late Bronze Age. The most likely explanation is that after fragmenting, the early Indo-European community either retained or re-kindled some kind of relationship or network, and cultural artifacts of various types could still travel broadly across this vast, disparate territory. It's extremely difficult to imagine some kind of continuity otherwise across this area going back all the way to the Corded Ware, which by the time the Nordic Bronze Age came along had already been gone for centuries, and the Corded Ware had started fragmenting centuries before that. It would require cultural continuity and connections going back well over a thousand years, maybe closer to two, which is obviously not very credible.
On the other hand, we know that there were smaller, earlier versions of "globalism" that spread across the Indo-European sphere, and the Bell Beaker cultural phenomena seems to be an example of that.
But untangling this mess of nuanced and not obvious clues and coming up with a coherent picture based on them is beyond my capability.
UPDATE: I just remembered; although I know longer have it, I used to have a paper that suggested the high probability that the status quo position is wrong; the Indians in North America did have a unique horse domestication event based on native horses that predates the arrival of Spanish horses, and the Indian ponies are (at least partially) descended from them. The extermination of Indian ponies by white colonists, of course, makes this difficult to verify via genetics, but there is considerable other evidence to suggest that it may be much more likely than we thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment