The societies that probably spoke classic Proto-Indo-European—the herders of the Yamnaya horizon—are introduced in chapter 13. They were the first people in the Eurasian steppes to create a herding economy that required regular seasonal movements to new pastures throughout the year. Wagons pulled by cattle allowed them to carry tents, water, and food into the deep steppes, far from the river valleys, and horseback riding enabled them to scout rapidly and over long distances and to herd on a large scale, necessities in such an economy. Herds were spread out across the enormous grasslands between the river valleys, making those grasslands useful, which led to larger herds and the accumulation of greater wealth.
Chapters 14 through 16 describe the initial expansions of societies speaking Proto-Indo-European dialects, to the east, the west, and finally to the south, to Iran and the Indian subcontinent. I do not attempt to follow what happened after the initial migrations of these groups; my effort is just to understand the development and the first dispersal of speakers of Proto-Indo-European and, along the way, to investigate the influence of technological innovations in transportation—horseback riding, wheeled vehicles, and chariots—in the opening of the Eurasian steppes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
First Farmers and Herders The Pontic-Caspian Neolithic
At the beginning of time there were two brothers, twins, one named Man (*Manu, in Proto-Indo-European) and the other Twin (*Yemo). They traveled through the cosmos accompanied by a great cow. Eventually Man and Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to sacrifice Twin (or, in some versions, the cow). From the parts of this sacrificed body, with the help of the sky gods (Sky Father, Storm God of War, Divine Twins), Man made the wind, the sun, the moon, the sea, earth, fire, and finally all the various kinds of people. Man became the first priest, the creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order.
After the world was made, the sky-gods gave cattle to “Third man” (*Trito). But the cattle were treacherously stolen by a three-headed, six-eyed serpent (*Ngwhi, the Proto-Indo-European root for negation). Third man entreated the storm god to help get the cattle back. Together they went to the cave (or mountain) of the monster, killed it (or the storm god killed it alone), and freed the cattle. *Trito became the first warrior. He recovered the wealth of the people, and his gift of cattle to the priests insured that the sky gods received their share in the rising smoke of sacrificial fires. This insured that the cycle of giving between gods and humans continued.1
These two myths were fundamental to the Proto-Indo-European system of religious belief. *Manu and *Yemo are reflected in creation myths preserved in many Indo-European branches, where *Yemo appears as Indic Yama, Avestan Yima, Norse Ymir, and perhaps Roman Remus (from *iemus, the archaic Italic form of *yemo, meaning “twin”); and Man appears as Old Indic Manu or Germanic Mannus, paired with his twin to create the world. The deeds of *Trito have been analyzed at length by Bruce Lincoln, who found the same basic story of the hero who recovered primordial lost cattle from a three-headed monster in Indic, Iranian, Hittite, Norse, Roman and Greek myths. The myth of Man and Twin established the importance of the sacrifice and the priest who regulated it. The myth of the “Third one” defined the role of the warrior, who obtained animals for the people and the gods. Many other themes are also reflected in these two stories: the Indo-European fascination with binary doublings combined with triplets, two’s and three’s, which reappeared again and again, even in the metric structure of Indo-European poetry; the theme of pairs who represented magical and legal power (Twin and Man, Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr); and the partition of society and the cosmos between three great functions or roles: the priest (in both his magical and legal aspects), the warrior (the Third Man), and the herder/cultivator (the cow or cattle).2
For the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, domesticated cattle were basic symbols of the generosity of the gods and the productivity of the earth. Humans were created from a piece of the primordial cow. The ritual duties that defined “proper” behavior revolved around the value, both moral and economic, of cattle. Proto-Indo-European mythology was, at its core, the worldview of a male-centered, cattle-raising people—not necessarily cattle nomads but certainly people who held sons and cattle in the highest esteem. Why were cattle (and sons) so important?
DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PONTIC-CASPIAN ECOLOGY
Until about 5200–5000 BCE most of the people who lived in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas possessed no domesticated animals at all. They depended instead on gathering nuts and wild plants, fishing, and hunting wild animals; in other words, they were foragers. But the environment they were able to exploit profitably was only a small fraction of the total steppe environment. The archaeological remains of their camps are found almost entirely in river valleys. Riverine gallery forests provided shelter, shade, firewood, building materials, deer, aurochs (European wild cattle), and wild boar. Fish supplied an important part of the diet. Wider river valleys like the Dnieper or Don had substantial gallery forests, kilometers wide; smaller rivers had only scattered groves. The wide grassy plateaus between the river valleys, the great majority of the steppe environment, were forbidding places occupied only by wild equids and saiga antelope. The foragers were able to hunt the wild equids, including horses. The wild horses of the steppes were stout-legged, barrel-chested, stiff-maned animals that probably looked very much like modern Przewalski horses, the only truly wild horses left in the world.3 The most efficient hunting method would have been to ambush horse bands in a ravine, and the easiest opportunity would have been when they came into the river valleys to drink or to find shelter. In the steppe regions, where wild horses were most numerous, wild equid hunting was common. Often it supplied most of the foragers’ terrestrial meat diet.
The Pontic-Caspian steppes are at the western end of a continuous steppe belt which rolls east all the way to Mongolia. It is possible, if one is so inclined, to walk, 5,000 km from the Danube delta across the center of the Eurasian continent to Mongolia without ever leaving the steppes. But a person on foot in the Eurasian steppes feels very small. Every footfall raises the scent of crushed sage, and a puff of tiny white grasshoppers skips ahead of your boot. Although the flowers that grow among the fescue and feathergrass (Festuca and Stipa) make a wonderful boiled tea, the grass is inedible, and outside the forested river valleys there is not much else to eat. The summer temperature frequently rises to 110‐120°F (43‐49°C), although it is a dry heat and usually there is a breeze, so it is surprisingly tolerable. Winter, however, kills quickly. The howling, snowy winds drive temperatures below −35°F (−37°C). The bitter cold of steppe winters (think North Dakota) is the most serious limiting factor for humans and animals, more restricting even than water, since there are shallow lakes in most parts of the Eurasian steppes.
The dominant mammal of the interior steppes at the time our account begins was the wild horse, Equus caballus. In the moister, lusher western steppes of Ukraine, north of the Black Sea (the North Pontic steppes), there was another, smaller equid that ranged into the lower Danube valley and down to central Anatolia, Equus hydruntinus, the last one hunted to extinction between 4000 and 3000 BCE. In the drier, more arid steppes of the Caspian Depression was a third ass-like, long-eared equid, the onager, Equus hemionus, now endangered in the wild. Onagers then lived in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran, and in the Caspian Depression. Pontic-Caspian foragers hunted all three.
The Caspian Depression was itself a sign of another important aspect of the Pontic-Caspian environment: its instability. The Black and Caspian Seas were not placid and unchanging. Between about 14,000 and 12,000 BCE the warming climate that ended the last Ice Age melted the northern glaciers and the permafrost, releasing their combined meltwater in a torrential surge that flowed south into the Caspian basin. The late Ice-Age Caspian ballooned into a vast interior sea designated the Khvalynian Sea. For two thousand years the northern shoreline stood near Saratov on the middle Volga and Orenburg o
n the Ural River, restricting east-west movement south of the Ural Mountains. The Khvalynian Sea separated the already noticeably different late-glacial forager cultures that prospered east and west of the Ural Mountains.4 Around 11,000–9,000 BCE the water finally rose high enough to overflow catastrophically through a southwestern outlet, the Manych Depression north of the North Caucasus Mountains, and a violent flood poured into the Black Sea, which was then well below the world ocean level. The Black Sea basin filled up until it overflowed, also through a southwestern outlet, the narrow Bosporus valley, and finally poured into the Aegean. By 8000 BCE the Black Sea, now about the size of California and seven thousand feet deep, was in equilibrium with the Aegean and the world ocean. The Caspian had fallen back into its own basin and remained isolated thereafter. The Black Sea became the Pontus Euxeinos of the Greeks, from which we derive the term Pontic for the Black Sea region in general. The North Caspian Depression, once the bottom of the northern end of the Khvalynian Sea, was left an enormous flat plain of salty clays, incongruous beds of sea shells, and sands, dotted with brackish lakes and covered with dry steppes that graded into red sand deserts (the Ryn Peski) just north of the Caspian Sea. Herds of saiga antelopes, onagers, and horses were hunted across these saline plains by small bands of post-glacial Mesolithic and Neolithic hunters. But, by the time the sea receded, they had become very different culturally and probably linguistically on the eastern and western sides of the Ural-Caspian frontier. When domesticated cattle were accepted by societies west of the Urals, they were rejected by those east of the Urals, who remained foragers for thousands of years.5
Domesticated cattle and sheep started a revolutionary change in how humans exploited the Pontic-Caspian steppe environment. Because cattle and sheep were cultured, like humans, they were part of everyday work and worry in a way never approached by wild animals. Humans identified with their cattle and sheep, wrote poetry about them, and used them as a currency in marriage gifts, debt payments, and the calculation of social status. And they were grass processors. They converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone—the foundation of both life and wealth. Cattle and sheep herds can grow rapidly with a little luck. Vulnerable to bad weather and theft, they can also decline rapidly. Herding was a volatile, boom-bust economy, and required a flexible, opportunistic social organization.
Because cattle and sheep are easily stolen, unlike grain crops, cattle-raising people tend to have problems with thieves, leading to conflict and warfare. Under these circumstances brothers tend to stay close together. In Africa, among Bantu-speaking tribes, the spread of cattle raising seems to have led to the loss of matrilineal social organizations and the spread of male-centered patrilineal kinship systems.6 Stockbreeding also created entirely new kinds of political power and prestige by making possible elaborate public sacrifices and gifts of animals. The connection between animals, brothers, and power was the foundation on which new forms of male-centered ritual and politics developed among Indo-European-speaking societies. That is why the cow (and brothers) occupied such a central place in Indo-European myths relating to how the world began.
So where did the cattle come from? When did the people living in the Pontic-Caspian steppes begin to keep and care for herds of dappled cows?
THE FIRST FARMER-FORAGER FRONTIER IN THE PONTIC-CASPIAN REGION
The first cattle herders in the Pontic-Caspian region arrived about 5800–5700 BCE from the Danube valley, and they probably spoke languages unrelated to Proto-Indo-European. They were the leading edge of a broad movement of farming people that began around 6200 BCE when pioneers from Greece and Macedonia plunged north into the temperate forests of the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin (figure 8.1). Domesticated sheep and cattle had been imported from Anatolia to Greece by their ancestors centuries before, and now were herded northward into forested southeastern Europe. Genetic research has shown that the cattle did interbreed with the native European aurochs, the huge wild cattle of Europe, but only the male calves (traced on the Y chromosome) of aurochs were kept, perhaps because they could improve the herd’s size or resistance to disease without affecting milk yields. The cows, probably already kept for their milk, all were descended from mothers that had come from Anatolia (traced through MtDNA). Wild aurochs cows probably were relatively poor milk producers and might have been temperamentally difficult to milk, so Neolithic European farmers made sure that all their cows were born of long-domesticated mothers, but they did not mind a little crossbreeding with native wild bulls to obtain larger domestic bulls.7
Comparative studies of chain migration among recent and historical pioneer farmers suggest that, in the beginning, the farming-and-herding groups that first moved into temperate southeastern Europe probably spoke similar dialects and recognized one another as cultural cousins. The thin native population of foragers was certainly seen as culturally and linguistically Other, regardless of how the two cultures interacted.8 After an initial rapid burst of exploration (sites at Anzabegovo, Karanovo I, Gura Baciului, Cirçea) pioneer groups became established in the Middle Danube plains north of Belgrade, where the type site of Starčevo and other similar Neolithic settlements are located. This central Danubian lowland produced two streams of migrants that leapfrogged in one direction down the Danube, into Romania and Bulgaria, and in the other up the Mureş and Körös Rivers into Transylvania. Both migration streams created similar pottery and tool types, assigned today to the Criş culture (figure 8.2).9
Figure 8.1 The migrations of pioneer farmers into Greece and across Europe between 6500 and 5500 BCE, including the colonization of the eastern Carpathian piedmont by the Criş, culture.
First Farmers in the Pontic Region: The Criş Culture
The names Criş in Romania and Körös in eastern Hungary are two variants of the same river name and the same prehistoric culture. The northern Criş people moved up the Hungarian rivers into the mountains of Transylvania and then pushed over the top of the Carpathian ridges into an ecologically rich and productive piedmont region east of the Carpathians. They herded their cattle and sheep down the eastern slopes into the upper valleys of the Seret and Prut rivers about 5800–5700 BCE. (Cris radiocarbon dates are unaffected by reservoir effects because they were not measured on human bone; see table 8.1.) The other migration stream in the lower Danube valley moved into the same eastern Carpathian piedmont from the south. These two groups created a northern and a southern variant of the East Carpathian Cris culture, which survived from about 5800 to about 5300 BCE. Cris farms in the East Carpathian piedmont were the source of the first domesticated cattle in the North Pontic region. The Criş pioneers moved eastward through the forest-steppe zone in the piedmont northwest of the Black Sea, where rainfall agriculture was possible, avoiding the lowland steppes on the coast and the lower courses of the rivers that ran through them into the sea.
Figure 8.2 Criş.-culture ceramic shapes and decorative motifs (top half), flint blades and cores (left), antler and bone tools (right), and ceramic rings (bottom) dated 5700–5300 BCE. After Dergachev 1999; and Ursulescu 1984.
TABLE 8.1 Radiocarbon Dates for the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic of the Pontic- Caspian Region.
Archaeologists have identified at least thirty Criş settlement sites in the East Carpathian piedmont, a region of forests interspersed with natural meadows cut by deep, twisting river valleys (figure 8.3). Most Criş farming hamlets were built on the second terraces of rivers, overlooking the floodplain; some were located on steep-sided promontories above the floodplain (Suceava); and a few farms were located on the high forested ridges between the rivers (Sakarovka I). Houses were one room, built with timber posts and beams, plaster-on-wattle walls, and probably reed-thatched roofs. Larger homes, sometimes oval in outline, were built over dug-out floors and contained a kitchen with a domed clay oven; lighter, smaller structures were built on the surface with an open fire in the center. Most villages consiste
d of just a few families living in perhaps three to ten smoky thatched pit-dwellings, surrounded by agricultural fields, gardens, plum orchards, and pastures for the animals. No Criş cemeteries are known. We do not know what they did with their dead. We do know, however, that they still prized and wore white shell bracelets made from imported Spondylus, an Aegean species that was first made into bracelets by the original pioneers in Early Neolithic Greece.10
Criş families cultivated barley, millet, peas, and four varieties of wheat (emmer, einkorn, spelt, and bread wheats). Wheat and peas were not native to southeastern Europe; they were exotics, domesticated in the Near East, carried into Greece by sea-borne immigrant farmers, and propagated through Europe from Greece. Residues inside pots suggest that grains were often eaten in the form of a soup thickened with flour. Charred fragments of Neolithic bread from Germany and Switzerland suggest that wheat flour was also made into a batter that was fried or baked, or the grains were moistened and pressed into small whole-grain baked loaves. Criş harvesting sickles used a curved red deer antler inset with flint blades 5–10 cm long, angled so that their corners formed teeth. Their working corners show “sickle gloss” from cutting grain. The same type of sickle and flint blade is found in all the Early Neolithic farming settlements of the Danube-Balkans-Carpathians. Most of the meat in the East Carpathian Criş diet was from cattle and pigs, with red deer a close third, followed by sheep—a distribution of species reflecting their largely forested environment. Their small-breed cows and pigs were slightly different from the local wild aurochs or wild boar but not markedly so. The sheep, however, were exotic newcomers, an invasive species like wheat and peas, brought into the steep Carpathian valleys by strange people whose voices made a new kind of sound.11
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 17
