Quote:Sul's name suggests that she was a SUN goddess, for it is connected to words that mean both "sun" and "eye". Despite this pointed connection, some scholars continue to look for a male sun divinity in the area, even suggesting that all inscriptions to Sul contain a misspelling of the word for "pig". Sul would be connected with such figures as BRIGIT, who in Ireland was associated with holy WELLS (in that case, rarely thermal) that were said to have healing properties. Like Brigit, too, Sul was said to have been served by a college of priestesses who attended an eternal flame. Occasionally Sul appears in the plural (see SULEVIAE); the same name is occasionally given to Brigit.

...

Today, "solar mythology" is disdained, and as a result antiquated attitudes about mythology have remained unexamined for more than a century.

Primary among these attitudes is the presupposition that the sun is invariably a masculine symbol. In fact, dozens of cultures from Japan to South America, from the Arctic to Arabia, have seen the sun as feminine. Yet examination of solar mythology generally halted while the assumption was still made that the Celts saw the sun as a male figure--as a god. Many candidates are proposed as the "Celtic sun god," including LUGH and LANCELOT, yet there is no definitive statement in any Celtic-language text that shows a god being honored as the sun.

There is, however, significant evidence that the Celts saw the sun as a goddess. Indeed the name of one goddess, SUL, means "sun". In the Irish language the word for "sun" has been feminine in gender since the first recorded usage; this word, grian, is occasionally used for a minor goddess figure who may be connected with or the same as the more prominent heroine GRÁINNE. A few scholars are hesitantly examining this question, but the general prohibition against solar mythology means that it has not been substantively explained.

Quote:... one issue remains problematic: in all Slavic languages, the word for Sun, Sunce, is of neutral or feminine gender, never masculine. Also, in Baltic mythology, which is most akin to Slavic, Sun is a female deity, Saule, while the Moon is a male one. The same pattern can be observed in folklore of many Slavic nations, where the Sun is most often identified with mother or a bride, and Moon with father or husband, their children being the stars. Where exactly this leaves Dažbog as a possible male solar deity of Slavic pantheon remains questionable.

Quote:Among the heavenly bodies the primary object of Slavic veneration was the moon. The name of the moon is of masculine gender in Slavic languages (Russian mesyats; compare Latin mensis). The word for sun (Russian solntse), on the other hand, is a neuter diminutive that may derive from an ancient feminine form. In many Russian folk songs a verb having the sun as its subject is put in the feminine form, and the sun is almost always thought of as a bride or a maiden.

Quote:Moon2 is a very old word. It was mona in Anglo-Saxon, and was used there, not as a feminine, but as a masculine; for the moon was originally a masculine, and the sun a feminine, in all Teutonic languages; and it is only through the influence of classical models that in English moon has been changed into a feminine, and sun into a masculine. It was a most unlucky assertion which Mr. Harris made in his Hermes, that all nations ascribe to the sun a masculine, and to the moon a femnine gender.3 In the mythology of the Edda Mani, the moon, is the son, Sol, the sun, the daughter of Mundilfori. In Gothic, mena, the moon is masculine; sunno, the sun, feminine. In Anglo-Saxon, too, the moon, continues to be used as a masculine; sunne, the sun, as a feminine. In Swedish, mane, the moon, is masculine; sol, the sun, feminine. The Lithuanians also give the masculine gender to the moon, menu; the feminine gender to the sun, saule;...

Quote:The Dereivka Horse of 4200 BCE



In 1991, David Anthony reported in the Antiquity a horse-and-dog burial from Dereivka (Ukraine) from a layer dated 4200-3700 BCE. This became widely accepted as the earliest domesticated horse, bringing the location of the Aryan home in the Ukrainian steppe at about 4,200 BCE. However, Levine (cited in Anthony 2009:214-215) in her detailed study of the horse-bones from the same layer of Dereivka and from another steppe site Botai (3700-3000 BCE, Kazakhstan) inferred that none of the horses found at these two places had actually been ever domesticated (cited ibid:205). Hausler (cited ibid:214-215) and many other specialists of ancient horse bones too never accepted the 4200 BCE date for the domestic horse in the steppe.



[...]

Then the skull bone of the horse was directly radiocarbon dated and found to be from 3000 BCE, which Anthony (1997) interpreted as contamination in the museum. However it was soon obvious that this radiocarbon report was wrong as the bone tested did not actually belong to the horse.



Thereafter another radiocarbon dating of the horse skull was done, giving the date 800-200 BCE (Scythian era). The conclusion emerged that the horse-burial had been dug deeper into the lower layers of the soil. David Anthony, author of the Dereivka story was left with no other choice, but to retract the claim, which he quickly did (Anthony:2000; 2009:215). He wrote, "New radiocarbon dates from Oxford and Kiev indicate that the Dereivka 'cult stallion' should be withdrawn from discussions of Eneolithic horse-keeping. The Dereivka horse died between about 700 and 200 BCE." (Anthony in Antiquity 2000).



This episode bulldozed the steppe-horse theory completely. Yet the Dereivka horse has been kept alive by many Eurocentric authors in the field. The belief in 4200 BCE steppe horse is perpetuated by the unscrupulous writings of prominent authorities like Trautmann (2005) who control and regulate the academic world. Trautmann republished in 2005 (and 2007:251-253) extracts from David Anthony's oldest article claiming the 4200 BC domestic horse of Dereivka (Ukraine). Trautmann did this and the Oxford University Press published it in spite of the fact that David Anthony had retracted from this older claim (of year 1991) in year 2000 (Antiquity). The hisotry writing has been brought down to the level of racist conspiracy.

Quote:In spite of the several horse hoaxes raised about the steppe, the recent archaeological studies seriously challenge the long held views that steppe was the home of the true horse. The archaeological study done at Begash (Kazakhistan) confirmed in a recent study: "While pastoral herding of sheep and goats is evident from the Early Bronze Age, the horse appears only in small numbers before the end of the first millennium BC" (Frachetti and Benecke 2009: Abstract).



The paper adds the "horse use seems to commence gradually and is not highly associated with early and middle Bronze Age pastoralists." (ibid:1025). The authors find, the "percentage of horse remains at Begash remain below 6 per cent until approximately AD 50 (Phase 3b)", and "The domestic horse is documented at Begash by the start of the second millennium BC, but its impact on pastoralism is not clear."

In our view, such stray domestic horses as ones documented from second millennium Begash, were Bronze Age imports from the further south, i.e. Iran and northwest India. Challenging the whole hypothesis, Frachetti and Benecke note: "Thus the data from Begash draw into question the general view that Eurasian pastoralism diffused eastward as a result of mounted horsemen in the Bronze Age".



A study at Tentek-sor (northern Caspian, Kazakhstan) revealed that horse bones do not increase between 4000 BCE and 2000 BCE (Koryakova), and the samples did not contain any domestic sheep or cattle, even wild aurochs was only 5% (Frachetti 2012:7, Koryakova 2007). However, after 2000 BCE we get a very large number of domestic cattle (60 to 90%) in the steppe and Central Asia, indicating the arrival of pastoralism into this region only after 2000 BC (Koryakova:88, 65, 146-147). This indicates that probably all the horse bones from earlier than 2000 BC dates are of the wild horses. Koryakova (p.54) noted "but horse bones are extremely rare in the Kurgans", and "a larger group of specialists share the idea that classical steppe nomadism appeared in the first millennium BCE" (ibid:55).

Quote:the role of the steppe chariots as anything more than a symbolic vehicle is still under discussion.

Quote:He [Mackay 1943] noted, " ... the people of Harappa culture were well acquainted with the Sumerians, it is not surprising that both two-wheeled and four-wheeled vehicles were in use in both countries" (ibid:164).



India could have been the source of the chariot for Sumeria, because Mackay notes that the Indian chariots recovered were of more primitive types than the Sumerian ones (ibid). *

Mackay described one metal chariot in detail which he thought was a war-chariot. He wrote, "But the shield-like front of the chariot shown in Pl LVIII 9,13--obviously intended to protect the driver--do certainly suggest something in the nature of a vehicle used in warfare" (1943:164).

[...]



Regarding the chariot wheels, Marshall noted that the models of the ones found from Mohenjo-Daro almost exactly resembled the Sumerian ones (Marshall:554).* In fact it is surprising that the entire excavation reports have been dumped and fictional stories have been concocted to create an impression that the Harappa people did not have fast chariots.

Quote:Abstract

We report the sequences of 1,244 human Y chromosomes randomly ascertained from 26 worldwide populations by the 1000 Genomes Project. We discovered more than 65,000 variants, including single-nucleotide variants, multiple-nucleotide variants, insertions and deletions, short tandem repeats, and copy number variants. Of these, copy number variants contribute the greatest predicted functional impact. We constructed a calibrated phylogenetic tree on the basis of binary single-nucleotide variants and projected the more complex variants onto it, estimating the number of mutations for each class. Our phylogeny shows bursts of extreme expansion in male numbers that have occurred independently among each of the five continental superpopulations examined, at times of known migrations and technological innovations.



....



In South Asia, we detected eight lineage expansions dating to ~4.0–7.3 kya and involving haplogroups H1-M52, L-M11, and R1a-Z93 (Supplementary Fig. 14b,d,e). The most striking were expansions within R1a-Z93, occurring 4.0–4.5 kya. This time predates by a few centuries the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization, associated by some with the historical migration of Indo-European speakers from the Western Steppe into the Indian subcontinent 27. There is a notable parallel with events in Europe, and future aDNA evidence may prove to be as informative as it has been in Europe.

Quote:Modern DNA reveals ancient male population explosions linked to migration and technology



Date:

April 25, 2016

Source:

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Summary:

The largest ever study of global genetic variation in the human Y chromosome has uncovered the hidden history of men. Research reveals explosions in male population numbers in five continents, occurring at times between 55 thousand and four thousand years ago.



Analysing the Y chromosomes of modern men can tell us about the lives of our ancestors. The Y chromosome is only passed from father to son and so is wholly linked to male characteristics and behaviours. The team used the data to build a tree of these 1200 Y chromosomes; it shows how they are all related to one another. As expected, they all descend from a single man who lived approximately 190,000 years ago.



The most intriguing and novel finding was that some parts of the tree were more like a bush than a tree, with many branches originating at the same point.



Dr Yali Xue, lead author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, explained: "This pattern tells us that there was an explosive increase in the number of men carrying a certain type of Y chromosome, within just a few generations. We only observed this phenomenon in males, and only in a few groups of men."



The earliest explosive increases of male numbers occurred 50,000-55,000 years ago, across Asia and Europe, and 15,000 years ago in the Americas. There were also later expansions in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, South Asia and East Asia, at times between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago. The team believes the earlier population increases resulted from the first peopling by modern humans of vast continents, where plenty of resources were available.



The later expansions are more enigmatic.



Dr Chris Tyler-Smith, from the Sanger Institute, added: "The best explanation is that they may have resulted from advances in technology that could be controlled by small groups of men. Wheeled transport, metal working and organised warfare are all candidate explanations that can now be investigated further."

(- Wheeled transport: as per archaeologist Kenoyer, SSVC had toys of wheeled vehicles dated 3500 BCE at the time Yamna was just beginning. And SSVC has wheel track imprints - i.e. SSVC didn't just have toys, they actually used wheeled vehicles.

- Metal working: seen in SSVC, Mehrgarh, to Tepe Hissar etc in Iran.

- Organised warfare: double-edged battle-axes etc were made in SSVC, and also sent from SSVC to Sumer. And Sumer aDNA from early Bronze Age to early Roman period turned out to be Indian-specific.

- See also point 2 below.)



All of the samples and data from the 1000 Genomes Project are freely available for use by other scientists and interested investigators.

Quote:The second model, known as the “Bactrian oasis hypothesis”, also postulates a two-step settlement of the Tarim Basin in the Bronze Age, but maintains that the first settlers were farmers of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (or BMAC, also known as the Oxus civilization) (ca. 2200–1500 B.C.) west of Xinjiang in Uzbekistan (north Bactria), Afghanistan (south Bactria), and Turkmenistan [17], followed later by the Andronovo people from the northwest (Fig. 1) [5, 7]. This model emphasises the environmental similarities between the Xinjiang and Central Asian desert basins, and suggests that certain features, including the irrigation systems, wheat remains, woolen textiles, bones of sheep and goats, and traces of the medicinal plant Ephedra found in Xinjiang could be evidence of links with the Oxus civilization [5, 7, 16]

Quote:The cemetery was excavated between 2002 and 2005, and consisted of five strata with radiocarbon dates ranging from 4000 to 3500 years before present (14C yBP) [19, 22].



...



In contrast, people bearing the south /west Asian components could have reached the Tarim Basin through the Pamirs, moving eastward along the south or north edges of the Tarim Basin. Recently one study showed that agricultural populations had contact with nearby mobile pastoralists at the beginning of the second millennium BC in Central Asia [58], indicating that genetic components of agriculturalists might also introgress into pastoralist populations. This was confirmed by the evidence that one Indian haplogroup was found in ancient Kazakhstan [37]. Therefore, people bearing the south/west Asian components could have first married into pastoralist populations, and reached North Xinjiang through the Kazakh steppe following the movement of pastoralist populations, then spread from north Xinjiang southward into the Tarim Basin across the Tianshan Mountains, and intermarried with the earlier inhabitants of the region, giving rise to the later, admixed Xiaohe community. Given that the south/west Asian components are relatively minor in the Xiaohe population, it is likely that nomadic herders from northern steppe had a greater impact on the eastern Tarim Basin than the Central Asian oasis farmers.

(Which sounds pretty much like they're arguing for early Indic influence on steppes - since "at the beginning of the second millennium BC in Central Asia" and travelling up the steppes. And note the authors are even arguing for genetic Indic influence: "marrying into pastoralist populations" and then "through the Kazakh steppe" spreading into Tarim.

The Chinese authors have only learnt about the steppist theory on Tarim and not learnt the steppist PIE theory let alone the steppe IA invasion theory, where Indians are only allowed to be invaded by steppes. No wonder I've not seen a single steppist quote the above paper. Also they say things like



The archaeological evidence for woolen textiles and the medicinal plant Ephedra* in the earliest Xiaohe layer and the Gumugou site indicate that the oasis culture (=BMAC, Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex in Afghanistan) had reached the Tarim Basin in the early Bronze Age. It is well known that Ephedra was used by oasis farmers, whereas it does not grow in the Russo-Kazakh steppe, nor is associated with the Afanasievo or Andronovo cultures [5, 7]. Furthermore, the wheat excavated from Xiaohe was hexaploid bread wheat, a cereal grain cultivated originally in the Near East [59]. Therefore, it is possible that the oasis route may have been significant in the peopling of Xinjiang in the early Bronze Age, at least northern or western Xinjiang. This was supported by the evidence that Indian haplogroup M25 was observed in one ancient individual from later Neolithic Ganqing region (data unpublished). The groups reaching the Tarim Basin through the oasis route may have interacted culturally with earlier populations from the steppe, with limited gene flow, resulting in a small genetic signal of the oasis agriculturalists in the Xiaohe community.

Quote:R-SRY1532.2 (R1a1)



R1a1 is defined by SRY1532.2 or SRY10831.2), understood to always include SRY10831.2, M448, L122, M459, and M516.[11][14] This family of lineages is dominated by M17 and M198. In contrast, paragroup R-SRY1532.2* lacks either the M17 or M198 markers.



The R-SRY1532.2* paragroup is apparently less rare than R1*, but still relatively unusual, though it has been tested in more than one survey. Underhill[13] reported 1/51 in Norway, 3/305 in Sweden, 1/57 Greek Macedonians, 1/150 Iranians, 2/734 ethnic Armenians, and 1/141 Kabardians. While Sahoo[15] reported R-SRY1532.2* for 1/15 Himachal Pradesh Rajput samples.

Quote:Half of Western European men descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’



[img caption:] A bronze age burial South Uist, in the Outer Hebridean Western Isles

Mass graves were replaced by individual burials for the elite in the Bronze Age showing a shift in social structure Credit: PA



Sarah Knapton, Science Editor



25 April 2016 • 6:14pm



Half of Western European men are descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’ who sired a dynasty of elite nobles which spread throughout Europe, a new study has shown.

("King". Nice storytelling. Forgetting "droit du seigneur" fantasies attributed to royalty, it's probably just some dude with umpteen wives/concubines etc. I've been told that eurocentrist IEists have a fetish for associating R1b with royalty whenever they can. But unless they can *prove* it was a king, enough with the storytelling.)



The monarch, who lived around 4,000 years ago, is likely to have been one of the earliest chieftains to take power in the continent.



He was part of a new order which emerged in Europe following the Stone Age, sweeping away the previous egalitarian Neolithic period and replacing it with hierarchical societies which were ruled by a powerful elite.



It is likely his power stemmed from advances in technology such as metal working and wheeled transport which enabled organised warfare for the first time.

(We're not going to pretend that metallurgy let alone wheeled carts were invented in the steppes or even Caucasus' Maykop, right? See archaeologist Kenoyer for dates on wheeled carts in SSVC. Beats the lame date on the wheeled cart in Yamna. Even toy wheeled carts in SSVC - though tracks of real wheeled carts exist at SSVC - are contemporaneous with earliest wheeled carts at Maykop.)



Although it is not known who he was, or where he lived, scientists say he must have existed because of genetic variation in today’s European populations.

(So that genetic variation in the relevant parts of Europe is derived only since the last 4000 years.)



Dr Chris Tyler-Smith, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said: “One of the most novel and exciting things we have found in the study is the extraordinary explosion in numbers of males at specific times.



“In Europe there was huge population expansion in just a few generations. Genetics can’t tell us why it happened but we know that a tiny number of elite males were controlling reproduction and dominating the population.



“Half of the Western European population is descended from just one man. We can only speculate as to what happened. The best explanation is that they may have resulted from advances in technology that could be controlled by small groups of men.

(NO. Don't speculate.)



“Wheeled transport, metal working and organised warfare are all candidate explanations that can now be investigated further.”

(Again. NONE of which were invented in the steppes. Or even Maykop in the Caucasus. Maykop may have transmitted it into the steppes and the steppes in turn transmitted this to parts of Europe, but they were not unique to steppes or even Maykop. Not their innovations. "Sorry" IE supremacist fantasists.)



[img caption:] A graphic showing DNA

Studying the genomes of people across the world can show how populations have spread Credit: Alamy



The study analysed sequence differences between the Y chromosomes of more than 1200 men from 26 populations around the world using data generated by the 1000 Genomes Project.



The Y chromosome is only passed from father to son and so is wholly linked to male characteristics and behaviours. Mutations reveal which are related to each other and how far apart they are genetically so that researchers can build a family tree.



Dr Yali Xue, lead author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, explained: “This pattern tells us that there was an explosive increase in the number of men carrying a certain type of Y chromosome, within just a few generations.



“We only observed this phenomenon in males, and only in a few groups of men.”



The team used the data to build a tree of the 1200 Y chromosomes. It shows how they are all related to one another. As expected, they all descend from a single man who lived approximately 190,000 years ago.



The most intriguing and novel finding was that some parts of the tree were more like a bush than a tree, with many branches originating at the same point.



The earliest explosive increases of male numbers occurred 50,000–55,000 years ago, across Asia and Europe, and 15,000 years ago in the Americas.



There were also later expansions in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, South Asia and East Asia, at times between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago. The team believes the earlier population increases resulted from the first peopling by modern humans of vast continents, where plenty of resources were available.



Dr David Poznik, from Stanford University, California, first author on the paper, said: “We identified more than 60,000 positions where one DNA letter was replaced by another in a man with modern descendants, and we discovered thousands of more complex DNA variants.



“These data constitute a rich and publicly available resource for further genealogical, historical and forensic studies.”



The research was published in the journal Nature Genetics.

Quote:ISOGG now uses marker L278 to define R1b1.



Maglio, Michael R. (2014-08-14). "Biogeographical Evidence for the Iberian Origins of R1b-L278 via Haplotype Aggregation (2014)". Origins DNA. Retrieved 2014-11-12.

Quote:R1b (R-M343)



R1b* (that is R1b with no subsequent distinguishing SNP mutations) is extremely rare. The only population yet recorded with a definite significant proportion of R1b* are the Kurds of southeastern Kazakhstan with 13%.[4][17] However, more recently, a large study of Y-chromosome variation in Iran, revealed R1b* as high as 4.3% among Persian sub-populations.[18]

Quote:[Map of Afanasievo trek - going E out of steppes into their 'locus of emanation' in south Siberia somewhere N of Jungghar Basin - captioned with:]

Afanasievo culture: the long trek (?3800-2400BC)



The steppe solution to the Tocharians coming into the Tarim Basin, at least the best one that I can imagine, has always been associated with the Afanasievo culture, that gets out very early -- possibly too early to work. Read - I think probably - the forthcoming issue of Current Anthropology. But it involves a long cultural trek from north of the Caspian Sea to the [Aral Sea? innersea?] and the High Altai and at the second stage - somehow - they move into the Tarim Basin.





The actual evidence within the Tarim Basin is flimsy thin.

Afanasievo cemeteries would be surrounded by round stone enclosures in the innersea and the Altai.

At Qäwrighul, one of the earliest of our cemeteries in the Tarim Basin, we have evidence for timber circles.

And that I'm afraid is about it.



[Image caption:] Qäwrighul

Stone enclosures > Timber circles



The fact that the Afanasievo culture, if you follow this, moves from north to south however, takes them to the Jungghar Basin. And there you can at least make contexts/contacts.

You can establish a credible archaeological link between the cemeteries of Afanasievo and Shamirshak (I'll use the Turkish since it's a lot easier than the Chinese here) where we do have similarities in ceramics, particularly the so-called ritual-footed vessels that are very characteristic of the steppe land and here we're finding in Xinjiang.

A bit more remotely, we might imagine that the baskets that we find in the steppe land regions in these earlier cemeteries are basically borrowing from earlier ceramic shapes.

Quote:In contact with Jilin University, just to find out what the latest opinion is by someone who did their PhD on this subject, basically confirms: we've got good connections between the Afanasievo, the steppe cultures and the Jungghar basin, but beyond that it is really difficult to demonstrate any further southern movement.



[Slide contains:]

Quote:Shao Huiqiu, Jilin University PhD

* As for the connections between the cultures in Xinjiang and Afanasievo culture, based on the finding recently, there was a similar culture with Afanasievo in Aletai northwest of Xinjiang. But it belongs to a different culture named "Qie Mu'er Qie Ke" [=Chinese variant of place name that's "Shamirshak" in Turkic]. According to the research of Kovalev, this culture was also found in western Mongolia.



* In my opinion, the connection between these two cultures are very close. They probably have co-existed for a period of time. Because of the lack of materials of northwest Xinjiang it is difficult to carry out a further study on this point.

Except the above mentioned culture in Aletai, no cultures could be connected Afanasiev directly in other areas of Xinjiang, I think..



* Hope this information is helpful to your research.



* Best Regards.

* Shao Huiqiu

Quote:2016 Apr 21. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.22996. [Epub ahead of print]

New cases of trepanations from the 5th to 3rd millennia BC in Southern Russia in the context of previous research: Possible evidence for a ritually motivated tradition of cranial surgery?

Gresky J1, Batieva E2, Kitova A3, Kalmykov A4, Belinskiy A5, Reinhold S6, Berezina N7.

Author information

Abstract

OBJECTIVES:



It is a big challenge to diagnose the motives behind trepanations in prehistoric crania. Surgical-therapeutic attempts may be apparent by the presence of fractures, however, ritual or nonmedical motives are rarely supported by visible evidence in the bones. This article presents data on the trepanations of several individuals from South Russia dating to the Eneolitic and Bronze Age that may indicate a ritual procedure. In these crania an operation was performed in the identical location, the midline, furthermore in one of the most dangerous places, on the obelion. No evidence for traumatic or other pathological reasons for performing the operations was observable.

Quote:A.R. Sankhyan and G.H Weber draw our attention to a multi-trephines skull from the Neolithic pit-dwellers of Burzahom in the Kashmir valley, probably suggestive of the practice of trepanation in prehistoric India, and push the archaeology of surgery into a hoary past.

Quote:The genetic landscape of Iran and the legacy of Zoroastrianism: Comparing haplotype sharing patterns among ancient and modern-day samples using a mixture model.

Iran is considered a pivotal region in the Fertile Crescent, occupying a central space between Africa and Eurasia, and has thus been extensively studied to infer the development of the earliest human civilizations and farming settlements. From a historical and cultural perspective, this region is also of great interest as the cradle of Zoroastrianism. With reported roots dating back to the second millennium BC in Iran, Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religions in the world and is now mainly concentrated in India, Iran, and Southern Pakistan. In this work we present novel genotype data from present-day Zoroastrians from Iran and India, along with a high coverage (10x) early Neolithic sample from Iran (7,455-7,082 BC), comparing these samples to publicly available genome-wide genotypes from >200 modern and ancient groups worldwide to elucidate patterns of shared ancestry. We apply a novel Bayesian mixture model to represent the DNA from modern and ancient groups or individuals as mixtures of that from other sampled groups or individuals, using a haplotype-based approach that is more powerful than commonly-used algorithms. Our mixture model identifies which sampled groups are most related to one another genetically, reflecting shared common ancestry relative to other groups due to e.g. admixture (i.e. intermixing of genetically distinct groups) or other historical processes. Interestingly, analysis of ancestry patterns revealed strong affinities of the Neolithic Iranian sample to modern-day Pakistani and Indian populations, and particularly to Iranian Zoroastrians, in stark contrast to Neolithic samples from Europe. We also identify, describe and date recent admixture events in modern-day Iranian groups that have altered their current genetic make-up relative to these ancient origins.

Quote:This pattern is also seen in ADMIXTURE analysis (Fig. 2b, SI6), which implies that the Yamnaya have ancestry from populations related to the Caucasus and South Asia that is largely absent in 38 Early or Middle Neolithic farmers but present in all 25 Late Neolithic or Bronze Age individuals. This ancestry appears in Central Europe for the first time in our series with the Corded Ware around 2,500 BCE (SI6, Fig. 2b, Extended Data Fig. 1).

Quote:Armenia_ChL (Chalcolithic Armenia) All three males from this population belong to Y-chromosome haplogroup L1a-M27/P329. The M27 mutation is common in South Asian haplogroup L Y-chromosomes1,2, but was absent in a survey of Y-chromosomes from Anatolia3. Haplogroup L occurs at a very low ~2% frequency in present-day Armenians4. Our results indicate that it was present in Chalcolithic Armenia, but the fact that all three Chalcolithic Armenians belonged to it should not be necessarily interpreted as evidence that it was common there, as our samples are from a single location (Areni-1 cave) and may represent a local founder population.

Quote:Beginnings of Indian Astronomy with Reference to a Parallel Development in China

Asko Parpola



Above: Kot Diji phase steatite button seal from Harappa



Abstract

Hypotheses of a Mesopotamian origin for the Vedic and Chinese star calendars are unfounded. The Yangshao culture burials discovered at Puyang in 1987 suggest that the beginnings of Chinese astronomy go back to the late fourth millennium. The instructive similarities between the Chinese and Indian luni-solar calendrical astronomy and cosmology therefore with great likelihood result from convergent parallel development and not from diffusion.



(Sort of the striking similarities between Taoism and Vedic religion - e.g. Sankhyam (the original=theistic kind) in both - being independent yet very alike at surface level. Details differ, as always.)



Introduction

In what follows, I propose that the first Indian stellar calendar, perhaps restricted to the quadrant stars, was created by Early Harappans around 3000 BCE, and that the heliacal rise of Aldebaran at vernal equinox marked the new year. The grid-pattern town of Rahman Dheri was oriented to the cardinal directions, defined by observing the place of the sunrise at the horizon throughout the year, and by geometrical means, as evidenced by the motif of intersecting circles. Early Harappan seals and painted pottery suggest that the sun and the centre of the four directions symbolized royal power.



Note: The early steatite seal above plays an illustrative role in the author's thesis.

Quote:Daily news



7 July 2016

Founders of Western civilisation were prehistoric dope dealers



...

Central Eurasia’s Yamnaya people – thought to be one of the three key tribes that founded European civilisation ­– dispersed eastwards at this time and are thought to have spread cannabis, and possibly its psychoactive use, throughout Eurasia.



...

However, there are reasons to believe that its mind-bending properties were a factor. Some researchers have suggested that burned cannabis seeds found at archaeological sites hint that the Yamnaya carried the idea of smoking cannabis with them as they spread across Eurasia.



David Anthony at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, who studies the Yamnaya, says the population may have used cannabis for its psychoactive properties on certain special occasions. “The expansion of cannabis use as a drug does seem to be linked to movements out of the steppe,” he says. “Cannabis might have been reserved for special feasts or rituals.”



(Isn't it past time that David Anthony were officially crowned the absolute king of Mere Speculation? I haven't heard him resist a single lie to evolve his IEist fantasies further - most of which no serious researcher apparently takes seriously, especially experts in the actual field. [E.g. the Sintashtan chariot claims.] It seems only amateur IEists actually approve of Anthony and his delusional written monologues. Good way of detecting amateurs who are merely obsessed with IEism and don't have any actual knowledge in the subject to distinguish documented, supported facts from blatant self-indulgent fantasy, I suppose.)



What’s more, Barney Warf at the University of Kansas in Lawrence says that we know from early Greek historians that post-Bronze Age nomadic pastoralists of the steppe who came after the Yamnaya – the Scythians – regularly used cannabis as a drug.



“People talk about Herodotus’s accounts of hanging out in the Crimean peninsula smoking weed with the Scythians,” he says.



Warf says the new work is fascinating, and should encourage more researchers to explore the history and prehistory of cannabis. “I think there’s a largely untold story of cannabis in Europe from the Bronze Age up until the Renaissance,” he says.

Quote:Weed as a cash crop



The researchers suggest that different groups of people across the Eurasian landmass independently began using the plant at this time – perhaps for its psychoactive properties or as a source of food or medicine, or even to make textiles from its fibres.



However, Tarasov and Long’s database suggests it was only in western Eurasia that cannabis was then used regularly by humans down the millennia. Early records of its use in East Asia are fairly scattered, says Long.



This pattern seems to have changed about 5000 years ago, at the start of the Bronze Age, when cannabis use in East Asia apparently intensified.



Tarasov and Long think this timing is significant. By then, nomadic pastoralists on the Eurasian steppe had mastered horse riding, allowing them to cover vast distances and begin forging transcontinental trade networks following the same routes that would become the famous Silk Road several millennia later.



This earlier “Bronze Road” allowed all sorts of commodities to spread between west and east, potentially including cannabis.



(Wait, did they just pretend the IEists invented the Silk Road? Not even Mallory - one of the original peddlers of "IE" Afanasievo in the Tarim - still argues for evidence of Afanasievo in the Tarim.



But the steppist morons riding horses 5000 years ago - or anywhere before about 3000 years ago - is an oft-repeated blatant lie, that those IEists most prone to compulsive lying keep up. <- Note, that's a way to identify compulsive liars.

As even the white supremacist steppist IEist Kuzmina admitted - and echoed by anatolian PIEist Renfrew - there's absolutely NO evidence of any steppist let alone "IE" steppists riding horses before the late 2nd millennium BCE. I.e. just before 1000 BCE = just before 3000YBP.

Quote: Archaeologist Renfrew (2000:44; quoted by Drews) wrote, “The mounted warrior nomad horseman does not make his appearance until the end of the second millennium”. Another prominent archaeologist who has been persistently researching the subject for long Kuzmina (2000:122, quoted by Drews:132) wrote “warrior-horsemen appear in the steppe not in the fourth millennium BC but at the end of the second millennium BC”.

And contrary to debile/amateur IEists trying to hold up Anthony's Mere Speculations, there has still been No evidence of steppists riding horses until just before 3000 years ago. Anyone who claims otherwise should be dismissed as peddlers of lies not even upheld by official spokespeople for PIEism.



In fact, many people are now slowly backing of from any intimate connection between horse-domestication and the invention of even wagons and IEism. [Although we know neither wheels nor wagons were invented by IE speakers. Not unless Sumeria and SSVC since before 3500 BCE were centres of IE.] It's a pity there's no death sentence for compulsive liars. If there was, I suspect fewer people would be ready to indulge in it and David Anthony would have remained the no-name hack he should have been in a better world.)

Quote:Alcohol is a direct cause of seven ​​forms of cancer, finds study

Analysis implicates alcohol in development of breast, liver and other types of cancer and says even moderate consumption is a risk

Friday 22 July 2016 00.15 BST

Quote:Alcohol causes 7 types of cancer, including breast, mouth and bowel cancers.

Quote:This pattern seems to have changed about 5000 years ago, at the start of the Bronze Age, when cannabis use in East Asia apparently intensified.



Tarasov and Long think this timing is significant. By then, nomadic pastoralists on the Eurasian steppe had mastered horse riding, allowing them to cover vast distances and begin forging transcontinental trade networks following the same routes that would become the famous Silk Road several millennia later.



This earlier “Bronze Road” allowed all sorts of commodities to spread between west and east, potentially including cannabis.

(There was no "Bronze Road" to do with "IE" steppe entities. Steppe entities *didn't* even ride horses until just before 1000 BCE, etc.)

Quote:Below is the image of a Jiroft horseman bearing a short lance. This is of interest as the Jiroft civilization dates back to the early Bronze age period (approximately in the 3rd millenium BC).



www.kavehfarrokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/lancer-jiroft2.jpg

Quote:The team uncovered more than two square kilometers of remains from a city dating back to at least the late 3rd millennium BC. The data Madjidzadeh's team has gathered demonstrates that Jiroft's heyday was from 2500 B.C. to 2200 B.C [2].

Quote:Bit (horse)



A bit is a type of horse tack used in equestrian activities, usually made of metal or a synthetic material, and is placed in the mouth of a horse or other equid and assists a rider in communicating with the animal. It rests on the bars of the mouth in an interdental region where there are no teeth. It is held on a horse's head by means of a bridle and has reins attached for use by a rider.

Quote:A bridle is a piece of equipment used to direct a horse. As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, the "bridle" includes both the headstall that holds a bit that goes in the mouth of a horse, and the reins that are attached to the bit.

Quote:Archaeologist Renfrew (2000:44; quoted by Drews) wrote, “The mounted warrior nomad horseman does not make his appearance until the end of the second millennium”. Another prominent archaeologist who has been persistently researching the subject for long Kuzmina (2000:122, quoted by Drews:132) wrote “warrior-horsemen appear in the steppe not in the fourth millennium BC but at the end of the second millennium BC”.

Quote:Bas-relief in Persepolis - a symbol of Zoroastrian Nowruz - in day of a spring equinox power of eternally fighting bull (personifying the Earth), and a lion (personifying the Sun), are equal

Quote: Aryan Politics and our Security Concerns -- B S Harishankar [vijayvaani.com/AuthorProfile.aspx?pid=858]

Aryan Politics and our Security Concerns

by B S Harishankar on 11 Aug 2018 2 Comments





In an article, ‘How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate’, Tony Joseph, former editor of Business World, argued that the population of the Caspian, Central Asian and Indian regions share a common DNA (The Hindu, June 16, 2017). Endorsing the Aryan Migration Theory, Joseph contended that Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans (actually the British designated them as such), streamed into India sometime around 2,000 – 1,500 B.C. when the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end. They brought with them the Sanskrit language and a distinctive set of cultural practices.



Joseph insisted that India is a multi-source civilisation, not a single-source one, and draws its cultural impulses, tradition and practices from a variety of lineages and migration histories. While the Left historians remained silent, the Left parties were exuberant. CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury gleefully tweeted: “the historical evidence of Aryan migration and the confluence that India is. Brilliant piece by @tjoseph0010”.



Then, once again eulogizing Tony Joseph’s article, Yechury observed: “akin to the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back, some recent findings based on scientific investigations on the genetic data suggest that there was, indeed, an Aryan migration into India around 3,500 to 4,000 years ago” (‘Battle against post-truth’, Frontline, June 21, 2017). Yechury argued that the latest scientific study suggests that Aryans came into India from somewhere near the Caspian Sea in Central Asia/Europe, which has shattered the fascist agenda in India.



Sitaram Yechury is one of the principal architects of the Muziris Heritage Project in Kerala whereby JNU historians and Euro-American scholars excavated Pattanam to ‘prove’ West Asian / Fertile Crescent contacts with India and search for the bones of Apostle Thomas. That the said Apostle never came to India at all is incidental.



Sunil Menon and Siddhartha Mishra, in a cover story titled, ‘We are all Harappans’ present the same theory of Aryan migration into India, and claim that the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi at Sarasvati Valley in Haryana has more affinity with Ancestral South Indian Tribal Population than with North Indians (Outlook, August 2, 2018). The story claims that Rakhigarhi samples have Iranian farmer ancestry, which can be claimed only by present day south Indians. It identifies the Fertile Crescent as one of the core areas of agriculture and domestication of animals. The authors assert that this shows the Harappans and Rig Vedics were two distinct lines, one replacing or subsuming the other and the Ancestral South Indian is everybody’s ancestor in South Asia.



Rakhigarhi sparked global controversy in 2014, when eminent South Asian archaeologists criticised the intervention of foreign lobbies and funding by an opulent NGO for this crucial archaeological site. The foreign funding at Rakhigarhi and current media propaganda call for a clearer understanding of the problem.

(Didn't know that. Bad move by Shinde and co. to have invited Harvard -- of all western institutions, the most actively anti-Indian and especially anti-Hindu -- to work with Indian aDNA.)



The Aryan migration theory currently picked up by Outlook, was repackaged in the early 1990s. Marxist historian Romila Thapar in an article in Journal of Asiatic Society of Bombay (1988-91) contended that, “if invasion is discarded then the mechanism of migration and occasional contacts come into sharper focus. These migrations appear to have been of pastoral cattle breeders who are prominent in the Avesta and Rigveda”. Interestingly, Thapar is one of the top patrons from JNU for KCHR’s Rs 200 crore Muziris Project that seeks to establish India’s Fertile Crescent links and the arrival of Apostle Thomas. Marxist historian Irfan Habib earlier vindicated the migration and Dravidian theories, in ‘The Rewriting of History’ (Outlook, February 13, 2002). Habib accused archaeologists and historians up in arms against Dravidian links to any great non-Aryan past: “presence of Dravidians in Indus Civilisation makes it so much more ours.”

...

Quote:In other news the Harvard team has signed an MOU to gain access to samples from the South Indian neolithic, but beaureaucratic red tapism in the ASI still delaying access

Quote:Rai disclosed that 148 independent skeletal elements from Rakhigarhi were screened for the presence of DNA molecules at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. Of the 148 skeletal remains, only two samples yielded any relevant DNA material.



Meanwhile, hectic last-minute efforts are on to get additional genetic details of the DNA material. One of the DNA samples recently faced contamination in a Seoul laboratory and efforts are on to segregate it. Samples were sent to laboratories in Seoul and Harvard for establishing accuracy. The contamination, Rai said, is unlikely to have any major bearing on the study’s primary findings.

Quote:Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2



Postby Prem Kumar » 30 Apr 2018 23:35

Here's an interesting tidbit: Niraj Rai, who has done a U-turn and become an AIT supporter, was granted a visiting scholarship at Harvard Medical School (Reich lab)!!



Recall the incident where Witzel offered Talageri a scholarship at Harvard if the latter changed his views



Now this guy Niraj Rai leaks information about the absence of R1a in IVC aDNA to Open Magazine, before his paper is even sent for peer-review!



Read in full www.pgurus.com/early-steppe-vs-middle-to-late-steppe/

Quote: About a week ago, an Indian scientist who has recently (2016–17) been awarded a visiting fellowship at the Harvard Medical School (where the new age race-theorist Third Reich is a faculty), and with access to ancient Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) bone samples with the ancient DNA in them, has claimed the following in an interview with the Open Magazine before the data has been submitted, peer-reviewed and published, “While Rai and Shinde are tight-lipped about what the DNA samples extracted from the Indus Valley remains show, Rai does reveal that the R1a genetic marker is missing in the sample. This is a significant revelation. R1a is believed to have originated sometime between 22,000 and 25,000 years ago.”

Quote:Niraj Rai Retweeted



Hari Menon [twitter.com/runbikehurry/status/971066805660934144]

‏ @runbikehurry

Mar 6



Hari Menon Retweeted Tony Joseph



The edifying sight of a culturally rich society actively trying to flush itself down the stupidity shitpipe.

Quote:Tony Joseph

‏ @tjoseph0010



"One of the Sanskrit scholars, Santosh Kumar Shukla, a professor at JNU, told Reuters he believes India’s Hindu culture is millions of years old."

Modern humans, Homo Sapiens, emerged only about 300,000 years ago!

www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture/

Quote:Postby Nilesh Oak » 18 May 2018 07:09

Too late here in Amarika. Came back from ~10 day long trip. Met with Vagheesh and spent 3 hours with him. Will provide brief summary in next few days.



I had made a list of predictions (about things) before meeting with Vagheesh. All of the predictions came out correct. Some of them with R-square much higher than even I had expected.



More soon



Nilesh

Top





....



Postby Nilesh Oak » 18 May 2018 19:46



A_Gupta wrote:

On Twitter, manastaramgini:

Indo-Aryans: If we go by mainstream indological models the RV should have been composed in the Panjab no earlier than ~2000-1900 BCE - stretching things to the limit butm more like ~1700 BCE \pm 100 yrs. There are some serious problems with this which have been overlooked. Hence, we conclude that the core RV, meaning a certain archaic kernel of it was definitely composed outside India and probably much earlier even if the final redaction and compilation happened later in India. We see no other way out.



—— this is how “interpretation” works.







This is Vagheesh Narasimhan's interpretation, too.



Vagheesh is also forced to interpret writing of Ramayana and Mahabharata sometime after 1500-2000 BCE in India, based on folk knowledge/memory of Indian continent, but written in Sanskrit (which OF COURSE existed only after 2000 BCE).



When I brought up the nature of Sanskrit names of all character and places of these two epics - he did not realize what I was saying for a while - but then recovered and said the same thing would apply to the names! When I asked what he meant by that.....he was not sure how to solve the problem....so I went into his shoes and asked if he meant, "the writers of the epics began with non-Sanskrit names of actual historical incidents from folk knowledge/memory and converted them to 'Sanskrit' based names ---individuals (Dasharatha, Sahadeva, Krishna, Balarama, Kumhbakarna, Dashagriv, Sugriv and Agastya, etc.) /places (Hastinapur, INdraprastha, Kurukshetra,Ayodhya etc.) /rivers (Sarasvati, Yamuna, Iravati, Narmada, etc.) /mountains (Himavat, Mahendra, etc.)/ etc---- before transcribing......He said, "Yes".



Fun times ahead!

Last edited by Nilesh Oak on 18 May 2018 21:03, edited 2 times in total.

Top







Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2



Quote



Postby Nilesh Oak » 18 May 2018 19:54



shiv wrote:

Anshuman Kumar ji, other than me and a few other mice no one has attacked linguistics yet so there has been no sustained attack on linguistics. And as far as my knowledge goes no one else has launched as much of a tirade against linguistics as I have done so please don't imagine things. That we must not be in silos is a banal truism but unless someone joins me in my love affair with linguistics my battle is going to be a lonely one. But I have cast the first or at least one of the earliest stones at that pseudoscience. It has to be done. Linguistics is one of the legs that western worldvoew stands on and it needs to be attacked to see how they will respond. And respond they will, given time.





+108



When Vagheesh asked me who are other good Linguistics experts besides Talageri? He did not explicitly state it but wanted to know who were the names from the other camp?.. The first camp being likes of Witzel.



I responded, "Dr. Shiv Sastry" and also added that 99.99% of linguistics experts do not know what the word 'SCIENCE' means. And then said, Dr. Shiv is an ACE. [I did not know at the time of conversation that Vagheesh Narasimhan had blocked SS on Twitter]

--

Vagheesh Narasimhan meets Li. Witzel (not unlike Dr. XYZ, Li. Witzel is my invention) often. He was going to meet Li. Witzel in next few days and I told him to convey my regards and also to check with him if he (Witzel) had a chance to read my Mahabharata book I sent to him in 2011.



I gave Vagheesh, author-autographed books of mine (both of them) and he told me he is eager to read them.



Nilesh

Last edited by Nilesh Oak on 18 May 2018 20:58, edited 1 time in total.







Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2



Quote



Postby RoyG » 18 May 2018 21:39



Nilesh Oak wrote:



A_Gupta wrote:

On Twitter, manastaramgini:

Indo-Aryans: If we go by mainstream indological models the RV should have been composed in the Panjab no earlier than ~2000-1900 BCE - stretching things to the limit butm more like ~1700 BCE \pm 100 yrs. There are some serious problems with this which have been overlooked. Hence, we conclude that the core RV, meaning a certain archaic kernel of it was definitely composed outside India and probably much earlier even if the final redaction and compilation happened later in India. We see no other way out.



—— this is how “interpretation” works.







This is Vagheesh Narasimhan's interpretation, too.



Vagheesh is also forced to interpret writing of Ramayana and Mahabharata sometime after 1500-2000 BCE in India, based on folk knowledge/memory of Indian continent, but written in Sanskrit (which OF COURSE existed only after 2000 BCE).



When I brought up the nature of Sanskrit names of all character and places of these two epics - he did not realize what I was saying for a while - but then recovered and said the same thing would apply to the names! When I asked what he meant by that.....he was not sure how to solve the problem....so I went into his shoes and asked if he meant, "the writers of the epics began with non-Sanskrit names of actual historical incidents from folk knowledge/memory and converted them to 'Sanskrit' based names ---individuals (Dasharatha, Sahadeva, Krishna, Balarama, Kumhbakarna, Dashagriv, Sugriv and Agastya, etc.) /places (Hastinapur, INdraprastha, Kurukshetra,Ayodhya etc.) /rivers (Sarasvati, Yamuna, Iravati, Narmada, etc.) /mountains (Himavat, Mahendra, etc.)/ etc---- before transcribing......He said, "Yes".



Fun times ahead!

Quote:ObservationsObservations

A Neuroscientist Explores the "Sanskrit Effect"



MRI scans show that memorizing ancient mantras increases the size of brain regions associated with cognitive function

By James Hartzell on January 2, 2018



A Neuroscientist Explores the "Sanskrit Effect"

[annoyingly they've put a Buddhist mandala image, rather than a Hindu one, when Samskritam is originally and exclusively Hindu=Vedic.

As is typical of inculturating missionary religions, Buddhism like Jainism didn't approve first and kicked at the devabhaaSha, and then eventually tried to steal it. Just like christianity.

No, it's NOT equally or in any part or remotely Buddhist/Jain/whatever. As with other matters, they just inculturated on it, i.e. theft from Vedic religio.]



A hundred dhoti-clad young men sat cross-legged on the floor in facing rows, chatting amongst themselves. At a sign from their teacher the hall went quiet. Then they began the recitation. Without pause or error, entirely from memory, one side of the room intoned one line of the text, then the other side of the room answered with the next line. Bass and baritone voices filled the hall with sonorous prosody, every word distinctly heard, their right arms moving together to mark pitch and accent. The effect was hypnotic, ancient sound reverberating through the room, saturating brain and body. After 20 minutes they halted, in unison. It was just a demonstration. The full recitation of one of India´s most ancient Sanskrit texts, the Shukla Yajurveda, takes six hours.



I spent many years studying and translating Sanskrit, and became fascinated by its apparent impact on mind and memory. In India's ancient learning methods textual memorization is standard: traditional scholars, or pandits, master many different types of Sanskrit poetry and prose texts; and the tradition holds that exactly memorizing and reciting the ancient words and phrases, known as mantras, enhances both memory and thinking.



I had also noticed that the more Sanskrit I studied and translated, the better my verbal memory seemed to become. Fellow students and teachers often remarked on my ability to exactly repeat lecturers’ own sentences when asking them questions in class. Other translators of Sanskrit told me of similar cognitive shifts. So I was curious: was there actually a language-specific “Sanskrit effect” as claimed by the tradition?





When I entered the cognitive neuroscience doctoral program at the University of Trento (Italy) in 2011, I had the opportunity to start investigating this question. India's Vedic Sanskrit pandits train for years to orally memorize and exactly recite 3,000-year old oral texts ranging from 40,000 to over 100,000 words. We wanted to find out how such intense verbal memory training affects the physical structure of their brains. Through the India-Trento Partnership for Advanced Research (ITPAR), we recruited professional Vedic pandits from several government-sponsored schools in the Delhi region; then we used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at India’s National Brain Research Center to scan the brains of pandits and controls matched for age, gender, handedness, eye-dominance and multilingualism.



What we discovered from the structural MRI scanning was remarkable. Numerous regions in the brains of the pandits were dramatically larger than those of controls, with over 10 percent more grey matter across both cerebral hemispheres, and substantial increases in cortical thickness. Although the exact cellular underpinnings of gray matter and cortical thickness measures are still under investigation, increases in these metrics consistently correlate with enhanced cognitive function.



Most interestingly for verbal memory was that the pandits' right hippocampus—a region of the brain that plays a vital role in both short and long-term memory—had more gray matter than controls across nearly 75 percent of this subcortical structure. Our brains have two hippocampi, one on the left and one on the right, and without them we cannot record any new information. Many memory functions are shared by the two hippocampi. The right is, however, more specialized for patterns, whether sound, spatial or visual, so the large gray matter increases we found in the pandits’ right hippocampus made sense: accurate recitation requires highly precise sound pattern encoding and reproduction. The pandits also showed substantially thickening of right temporal cortex regions that are associated with speech prosody and voice identity.



Our study was a first foray into imaging the brains of professionally trained Sanskrit pandits in India. Although this initial research, focused on intergroup comparison of brain structure, could not directly address the Sanskrit effect question (that requires detailed functional studies with cross-language memorization comparisons, for which we are currently seeking funding), we found something specific about intensive verbal memory training. Does the pandits’ substantial increase in the gray matter of critical verbal memory organs mean they are less prone to devastating memory pathologies such as Alzheimer's? We don't know yet, though anecdotal reports from India's Ayurvedic doctors suggest this may be the case. If so, this raises the possibility that verbal memory “exercising‘ or training might help elderly people at risk of mild cognitive impairment retard or, even more radically, prevent its onset.



If so, the training might need to be exact. One day I was filming four senior pandit teachers demonstrating the different recitation speeds. Partway into one session all four suddenly stopped. “What’s wrong?‘ I asked. “One of us made a slight error," came the response. "I don’t mind," I said. "Yes, but we do," and they restarted the entire recitation from the beginning.





Author's note: Senior personnel responsible for this project were not involved in the conception or writing of the blog text; it was not presented to them for approval; any opinions or conclusions expressed in the blog are Dr. Hartzell's alone.



This post was written by a graduate of the online course Share Your Science: Blogging for Magazines, Newspapers and More, offered by Scientific American and the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, with sponsorship from the Kavli Foundation.





James Hartzell is a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, in Spain; a Guest Researcher at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at University of Trento, in Italy, and a Consultant for the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, in New York.

Quote:ak2014b says:

9th August 2018 at 15:25



I’m not up to date on the chariot evidence at Sintashta. I read the news originally reported around the mid 1990s of David Anthony’s finds of what were possibly chariots.



News reports mentioned that the assigned dates were contested. There were no actual chariot remains, only the stains made by wheels and some superstructure. Archaeologists dated the grave goods at the site to 1600 BC. Anthony had the horse bones at the site dated, which were found to be from a little before 2000 BC. Anthony went with the date of the horse bones for the chariots a.o.t. using the date of grave goods. (discovermagazine.com/1995/apr/chariotracersoft500) Anthony’s interviews of the time mentioned he felt that this meant chariots may have been invented in the steppes. But it was not fully resolved for others. For instance, if the grave goods actually belonged with the buried vehicle (other archaeologists did write that the ostensible chariots of Sintashta were purely grave goods and never put to actual use), and if the horses were from an earlier layer, as turned out to be the case in some other key finds by Anthony, then this once more puts question marks over the geographic origins for true chariots and over the earliest dates for their appearance in the steppe.



At the time, it was moreover not unanimous that the wheel imprints necessarily belonged to chariots. Like the argument presented at nytimes.com/1994/02/22/science/remaking-the-wheel-evolution-of-the-chariot.html, ‘Mary Littauer, an independent archeologist and co-author of “Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East” (Brill, 1979), was not ready to concede the point. “It’s still debatable,” she said. “A spoked wheel is not necessarily a chariot, only a light cart on the way to becoming chariots.”‘



I am likely to have missed a lot of the subsequent developments in the state of the evidence since the mid 1990s, and have tried to find them but have not had any success. Does anyone here know if there’s been further evidence from Sintashta since then that has been able to resolve these uncertainties and which have at last clearly established that the Sintashta structures are in fact of a chariot, a true chariot moreover, and with indisputable dates now provided? (Evidence as clear, tangible and date-able as what we have for various carts to chariots of the Middle-East, for instance.)



Alberto, do you further know of any photos of the imprints of the wheels that show off the spokes of the Sintashta chariots? I’ve seen drawings and reconstructions, and some foggy photos, but have long wanted to see some photos showing the spokes clearly.



---

ak2014b says:

9th August 2018 at 15:31



> Yes I’m sure we will find out soon where horse domestication first occurred – it might be surprising for most but few people



Besides the western steppe, Iberia and Alberto’s additional suggestion of Anatolia, is there a case to be made for Armenia or the southern Caucasus for horse domestication? Anthony mentioned that the same indicators implying possible horse domestication (possible bit wear) that were found in Botai was found earlier in Armenia by other archaeologists.





---

Robert says:

9th August 2018 at 21:17



@ Ak2014b



Yes I recall the shifting dates. I’ll try look st it further. As you mention, it wouldn’t be the first time a date has been incorrect, and sometimes “facts” are just echoed from writer to writer.



About horse domestication, I’m not privy to the results (& wouldn’t say so if I did). But I’m sure they’ll make sense in the big picture of pastoralist development.





---

ak2014b says:

10th August 2018 at 13:38



Thanks! Anything you find could go a long way to answering my questions.



> About horse domestication, I’m not privy to the results (& wouldn’t say so if I did). But I’m sure they’ll make sense in the big picture of pastoralist development.



Yes, I understand. I look forward to any publications that deal with this. Hopefully it won’t be long. Fortunately, FrankN’s 2nd guest post has a more definite date of around next week, so there’s other interesting revelations to look forward to in the immediate future.



If you get a chance, Rob, could you look at my questions for you at adnaera.com/2018/07/29/some-interesting-fresh-adna-from-central-europe/#comment-159? It’s understandable if you’re unable to respond with answers if in doing so you might have to reveal something that you’re not free to disclose.





---

Alberto says:

10th August 2018 at 14:27



@ak2014b



When Nick Patterson wrote at Eurogenes that the only reason why they didn’t publish any sample from India was because they just didn’t have them, and not for any political agendas, he was telling the truth. You’ve already read reports about the difficulty to get DNA from those Rakhigarhi samples, with apparently only one being really usable after years of trying (and that’s the only reason for the delay).



So I think that a boutade during a heated debate echoing some rumours that were circulating should be taken just as that. There’s no successfully sequenced Neolithic DNA from India so far (thought it might be on the way).



Regarding the Sintashta questions, I think that there has not been further data corroborating it in an unambiguous way (though I might have missed it), but with the evidence available it does seem reasonable to accept it as the most likely scenario for now. In any case, it doesn’t have much historical relevance, since like wagons and solid wheels more than a thousand years before, they spread faster than the people who invented them. By the time Sintashta/Andronovo people might have started to go south, the people from the south already had better chariots, so that was not an advantage for the non-existent conquering that some people fantasize about.





---

ak2014b says:

10th August 2018 at 21:39



@Alberto,



If you’re also unable to find definitive evidence, then I’m no longer convinced now about chariots of any kind in Sintashta. Archaeologists, including Anthony himself, have had over 3 decades now to find more conclusive evidence. The fact that that it hasn’t been found, and that in the meantime what he originally described as his “gut feeling” about Sintashta originating chariots has merely morphed (without the backing of additional support since) into blogs and fora repeating his feeling as a certainty, may indicate that no more work is being done or that there may be no further evidence to back up the claim.



Unambiguous chariots and true chariots have been found elsewhere. Until the archaeological finds at Sintashta, the Middle-East was for this reason considered to have been the origin of the chariot and for various developmental stages of it, including of the true chariot as per my understanding. For instance, the earlier mentioned 1994 news report at nytimes.com/1994/02/22/science/remaking-the-wheel-evolution-of-the-chariot.html says about the Sintashta finds that “The discovery could also lead to some revision in the history of the wheel, the quintessential invention, and shake the confidence of scholars in their assumption that the chariot, like so many other cultural and mechanical innovations, had its origin among the more advanced urban societies of the ancient Middle East.”



However, if there’s still the reasonable possibility that the chariots in Sintashta are not so early after all (or actually chariots at all), then the previous dates for earliest instances of chariots being in the Middle East ought to take precedence again, as that region had what were unambiguously chariots based on clearly date-able evidence. The Middle Eastern chariot evidence dates to 200 years past the higher end date that Anthony settled on for the finds at Sintashta (discovermagazine.com/1995/apr/chariotracersoft500 again), and this is what finally gave Sintashta the edge in the quest for determining where the vehicle originated. But with that as a question mark, the Middle Eastern dates, despite being 200 years later, at least offer certain evidence of definite chariots at that definite time.



The Middle East further demonstrates, starting at far earlier times, development stages from early wagons to get to chariots. And we know with certainty that they were used as chariots. In contrast, Sintashta is a culture that started around its presumed fully developed true chariot’s assigned date of around 2000 bc. Sintashta chariots, or carts as they may have been, have further not been shown to have been put to any actual use at all, only as grave goods. (Notwithstanding arguments by Anthony or anyone else to make a case for their use.)



There are also follow-on effects and assumptions that become open-ended again. For instance, a main reason for Sintashta as the source of Indo-Iranian was that it had true chariots. If it possibly didn’t have true or other chariots after all, then that weakens the dependent argument that it must have been Indo-Iranian. For example, there are other steppe MLBA cultures rich in R1aZ93 up for consideration as Indo-Iranian homeland again. Though if they didn’t have chariots either, and if chariots have to remain closely tied to Indo-Iranian, then maybe this is a larger problem? Perhaps this is even connected to your pointing out the surprising paucity of R1a in the aDNA from Swat in South or South Central Asia in a recent paper, and its late presence there. I’m not comfortable with ruling anything out about this yet. I merely wish to observe that if Sintashta has not provided definite evidence of early chariots, then the runner up for earliest should become the primary contender once more. Anything less further does an injustice to Middle Eastern history.



It’s therefore frustrating that so many have been made to labour under the assumption (as I had) that Sintashta originated the true chariot or had chariots at all, if this indeed remains ultimately an assumption up to the present. I think those who continue to conclude so ought to be corrected from now on, so that it doesn’t continue to proliferate and so they can avoid mistakenly building further assumptions or arguments on shaky foundations. As a consequence, I’m no longer as closed to Anatolia or the Caucasus or FrankN’s suggestion of NW Iran as valid alternatives for the PIE or LPIE homelands, now that several lines of evidence for a steppe homeland that I once thought were certain have proven less so.





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Alberto says:

11th August 2018 at 08:10



@ak2014b



Yes, you have a point there. As Robert also mentioned above, it’s quite normal to see that someone’s hypothesis turns into an accepted fact without much scrutiny. It is frequent in books to read things like that Afanasievo introduced metal working to China (or horses, or wheeled vehicles) for which the evidence is completely absent (basically the same that can be said about linking Afanasievo to Tocharian language). Many things about the steppe were based in very old non-C14 dated reports that had never been seen or verified by western scholars and that were in dire need of revision.



Besides, I also agree that David Anthony has been quite vocal using strong arguments to support as facts things that are just hypotheses. The kind of arguing that can be seen in the paper linked in the post about the importance of wheeled vehicles for the chronology of PIE (though I find the general argument acceptable, his arguing is far too radical in his assumptions about “impossibilities” and our ability to infer with any certainty things about languages spoken over 5000 years ago for which we have no direct evidence (or even close to them). A more nuanced argumentation would be welcome, but then it would not be so effective in turning it into an accepted “fact”.



So yes, these things do need some further debate, and experts should be more critical when examining certain hypotheses instead of just accepting them as proven facts based on some big words.



On a related note, I forgot to mention the recent news about a chariot unearthed recently in India (but again, these are early news that will need some time to be verified, understood and put in the right context):



outlookindia.com/website/story/asi-excavated-sanauli-chariots-have-potential-to-challenge-aryan-invasion-theory/312415

Robert says:

11th August 2018 at 10:40



One can always refer to the sober analysis Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky



books.google.se/books?id=fHYnGde4BS4C&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=carbon+date+sintashta+chariots&source=bl&ots=qEVgQDhAP1&sig=nQzXu-_3GUDZ1tKuRlMRDrJu5mA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj8p966zOTcAhUBzmEKHf4sAt0Q6AEwCnoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=carbon%20date%20sintashta%20chariots&f=true

ak2014b says:

11th August 2018 at 18:19



Thanks and thanks.



The page (156) that Rob has pointed out notably contains “The Sintashta chariots are by no means the earliest ones known. There are several sealing impressions depicting a chariot and driver in a Mesopotamian Early Dynastic III glyptic, c 2500 BC (Littauer and Crouwel 1979; Green 1993: 60).”



Mary Littauer, the first author cited, is the same archaeologist who was interviewed and found the chariot nature of Anthony’s Sintashta finds to be debatable. That would make the 2500 BC Middle East vehicle mentioned in Littauer and Crouwel 1979 an indisputable chariot, considering how exacting Littauer is about the definition.



Such a very early Middle Eastern chariot deserves to become better known, with credit rightfully restored.



> On a related note, I forgot to mention the recent news about a chariot unearthed recently in India



I was made aware that South Asia possessed wagons and carts (and possible chariots, from miniature figurine forms) mainly from a link at anthrogenica to a paper by Kenoyer, on the kind of ancient wheeled vehicles developed in South Asia.



IVC’s copper-based metallurgy is roughly contemporaneous with Iranian settlements, starting around 6000 or 5000 bc. The wheels used in the IVC vehicles were solid, not spoked, which matches up with the report, “The wheels were found solid in nature, without any spokes, Dr Manjul says.” Furthermore, Iran attests to chariots with crossbar wheels by 2350 bc. So for South Asia to have had copper chariots in the reported period of 2000-1800 bc isn’t entirely unexpected.



However, for Indian chariots to be relevant to any discussion of Indo-Iranian, it’s expected they be true chariots: harnessed to horses, having spoked wheels and matching those other particulars defined in your quotation from Anthony. Sintashta was presented as fitting the bill, though now it seems it’s not guaranteed to fit the basics.



Kenoyer did bring up mention of spoked wheels in regards to the IVC, as well as new accounts of IVC spoked wheel data that he hadn’t personally verified, but he noted that the topic itself was controversial for being considered associated with IE (and therefore considered mutually exclusive with IVC). I’ve not kept abreast of further developments surrounding this, however.



And in looking for further information, there’s still no actual knowledge about the kind of draft animals involved in the India chariot finds, though the researchers don’t rule out horses (xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/07/c_137237324.htm)

‘On animals used to draw the chariots, Manjul said, “It could be a bull or a horse, but having said that the preliminary understanding points to the horse.”‘



And since the wheels were further described as solid and therefore without spokes, they’re not true chariots. Despite that, these new finds in India are very interesting in their own right, including the buried royalty with their copper weapons. This shows the native cultures encompassed warriors among its population, and that South Asian metallurgy had also been used for warfare. The other interesting feature is that these Indian chariots, currently estimated at 2000-1800 bc, are in copper. In contrast, Sintashta’s ones are from either 2000 or otherwise 1600 bc and were to have been made of wood as explanation for the absence of any actual chariot remains and only imprints surviving. This contrast seems to confirm what you said, that Steppe MLBA could not have invaded to find a helpless population at all, but one armed with metal chariots besides weapons.



Hopefully we’ll get to see some interesting aDNA from the presumed royal remains associated with the buried chariots.

ak2014b says:

11th August 2018 at 19:16



There’s mention of a new paper “Horses may have been ridden in battle as early as the Bronze Age (Chechushkov et al. 2018)” at eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/08/horses-may-have-been-ridden-in-battle.html



An excerpt states “We investigated changes in function over time through the use of experimental replicas used in bridling horses. This experimental work supports the hypothesis that these objects served to bridle harnessed (shield-like) or ridden (plate-formed and rod-shaped) horses. Moreover, comparison of use wear on the ancient artifacts with the replicas provides insight into how long the artifacts were used before they were deposited in the funeral contexts or discarded. These observations support that the Sintashta chariots dating back to ca. 2100 BC were ridden and suggest the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1200 BC) as the earliest possible date for horseback riding in warfare.”



It’s an example of research also descending into ‘building further assumptions on shaky foundations’ of my earlier complaint.



The date and very nature of the Sintashta vehicles as chariots are contested. Selectively reiterating Anthony’s date for the chariots has made Sintashta into a myth that’s built up, rather than uncovering the historical reality of Sintashta as far as this can be uncovered. Experiments using replicas to argue that Sintashta vehicles were put to use do not amount to actual evidence, when archaeology has not been able to actually show that they were ever more than merely grave goods, such as by the attestation of wheel tracks.



For contrast, on a genetics forum, there were people demanding evidence that the early attestation of toy wagons and carts in the form of miniatures in South Asia translated to real life use. Evidence was demanded citing that Aztecs too had toys with wheels and that it didn’t follow that these were put to use. The expectation was therefore that wheeled vehicles remained as toys in South Asia as well. In response, Kenoyer’s paper was cited for mentioning the wheel track marks of a wagon, and finally laid that to rest. However, similar to assumptions about Afanasievo, for Sintashta too, no one asks for archaeological evidence like track marks. Experiments with replicas seem to suffice to settle the matter. Using methods to merely infer conclusions about the past may not have been acceptable for wheeled vehicles in South Asia had there been no wheel tracks.



It has turned out that the Middle East has very early chariots compared to Sintashta (2500 bc vs 2000/1600 bc), but there’s this general disinterest to consider anything non steppe as a source of innovation for things the steppe is “competing” with. The resulting discussions seem to take place in isolation from the rest of world history, as if the rest doesn’t exist. It’s detrimental enough for non-experts to indulge in this, but it becomes worse when the behaviour extends to the realm of research.



Another example of this is the general sounding claim in the new Chechushkov et al 2018 paper that their replica based experimental results “suggest the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1200 BC) as the earliest possible date for horseback riding in warfare.” Yet at kavehfarrokh.com/iranica/militaria/military-history-and-armies-of-scythians-sarmatians-and-achaemenids/image-of-a-jiroft-horseman-with-short-lance/ is tangible evidence, in the form of a photo of a sculpture depicting a rider bearing a lance, sitting astride a bridled horse. (It actually looks like he has a helmet of sorts on, further suggesting the context of warfare.) The sculpture is from the Jiroft culture, in Iran. When I search for “Jiroft”, google comes back with “Jiroft culture‎: ‎c. 3100 – c. 2200”. This is far better evidence of early horseback riding in warfare than experiments with replicas. It’s also far earlier than Chechushkov et al 2018’s timeframe of 1500-1200 bc, yet the evidence from Jiroft is presumably ignored or perhaps deemed insufficient. The result is that the world at large remains ignorant of actual world history. If the same figurine had been found in a steppe culture, especially at that early date, the treatment would be totally different.



Kuz’mina and several other specialists have repeatedly stressed that archaeological data has so far not been able to provide evidence for mounted warriors in the steppe until the end of the 2nd millennium bc. The recourse to results from experimental replicas to now argue otherwise, feels like an attempt to bypass the lack of archaeological support. I’m not sure why researchers so invested in the subject don’t just accept it or continue to look for more actual evidence in the steppe. None of it however explains why earlier evidence from other places continues to be ignored.





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Alberto says:

12th August 2018 at 09:22



@ak2014b



A problem that I mentioned in the post is the terminology used. Is it a requirement for a chariot to have spoked wheels instead of solid ones? Is it a requirement that it’s pulled by true horses and not some other equids? And is it necessary that the driver is standing and not sitting? And should they use bits and cheekpieces or are those unnecessary?



What apparently was invented by the Sintashta people was the spoked wheel and the use of true horses with bits and cheekpieces.



The “sealing impressions depicting a chariot and driver in a Mesopotamian Early Dynastic III glyptic, c 2500 BC” might not qualify. For example, in “Excavations at Abu Salabikh, 1978-79” by J.N. Postgate (page 104) there are some descriptions mentioning “Head of horse (?) – ridge for mane, ears and pierced nostrils“. Also: “Figure seated in two-wheeled chariot drawn by equid(s), which trample on a recumbent enemy. Behind chariot, jar or outsize dagger and a skirted figure.”



Regarding the importance of spoked wheels for Indo Iranians, this should be understood as a symbolic thing, and not literally as wheels made with spokes and used in real vehicles. The symbolism described in the Rigveda regarding the wheel (chakra) with specific number of spokes depending on what it symbolises is well represented during the Chalcolithic in amulets or even terracotta wheels (for vehicles) that is unclear if they were made with spokes (unlikely, since they’re made solid in terracotta) or just decorated with spokes for its symbolic meaning. This kind of symbolism is important and mostly ignored when interpreting the Rigveda as a proof of a steppe origin of the Aryans.



A good article and discussion can be found at indologist Giacomo Benedetti’s blog here:



new-indology.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-wheel-from-mehrgarh-to-vedas-and.html





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ak2014b says:

12th August 2018 at 18:03



Thank you, I’ll have a read. I did not mean to sound dismissive of the India finds. I accept it can be some kind of chariot, but meant to point out that it fails to meet the specifications for true chariots because of the type of wheels.



> What apparently was invented by the Sintashta people was the spoked wheel and the use of true horses with bits and cheekpieces.



Yet even so, the problems pointed out earlier would remain. If the horse bones were of 2000 bc and the grave goods at the burial site were from 1600 bc, and if the ostensible chariot still could be from either period, then if the vehicle was in fact from 1600 bc, they can’t demonstrate its connection to the horses. Anthony would have had to conclude the vehicle was of the same era as the horses in order to make his argument that this was the place true chariots first originated, thereby dislodging the true chariots found 200 years later in the Middle East from primary consideration.



All others are expected to be rigorous with their evidence, those making a case for the steppe ought to be held to the same standards. Until there is certainty regarding the dates, the Sintashta vehicles if true chariots cannot be mentioned as the earliest without constant qualification.



Moreover, Littauer’s argument (above) was that the evidence from Sintashta was not sufficient to conclude it was necessarily a chariot generally. That would consequently rule out that there was sufficient evidence to satisfy the more restrictive requirements for the true chariot.



But Littauer and Crouwel gave more complete consideration to Anthony and others’ claims when they later returned to the very subject matter of true chariots in a paper responding to Anthony’s early date for the Sintashta finds as war chariots. It’s a paper which incidentally reproduces the kind of photos from Sintashta that I was earlier searching for.



In The origin of the true chariot (Littauer & Crouwel 1996) [cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/origin-of-the-true-chariot/727D882D2F2E1BBC19AE1F9FA02A35AB] the two authors take the reconstructions of the Sintashta chariots and Anthony’s date in stride (2000 bc-1800 bc as it turns out, a.o.t. 2000 bc), as also working by Anthony’s arguments that horses would have been ridden early in the steppes. They clearly express reservations about the reconstructions, but by taking these seriously the authors point out the Sintashta vehicle is flawed mechanically. When they take only the actual archaeological remains into consideration, the authors find the Sintashta two wheeled vehicles could not have served for warfare or racing purposes. (The 2 purposes Indo-Europeans are to have used them [color="#800080"][chariots][/color] for.)



They still come to the conclusion that both the chariot and true chariot’s origins were in the Middle East rather, further pointing out that the continuous development and refinement of wheeled vehicles from 4 to 2 wheels to chariots and true chariots is demonstrable there. In contrast, “no early tradition of fast transport by two-wheeler existed on the steppe”, referring also to Izbitser’s work (1993) on the earlier steppe Pit-Grave culture’s 4 wheeled vehicles, of which they remark “What also seems to emerge from Dr Izbitser’s work is that many of the four-wheeled vehicles buried with seated passengers would have been more suitable for processions and for burial rites than for workaday use. These must have been ceremonial, status-conferring vehicles.”



The authors find the lighter spoked wheel of the chariot too was to have logically been developed in the Near East (so despite Anthony’s earlier date): “Does it not seem more likely that the horse’s introduction to draught in the Near East stimulated the local wheelwrights to invent a lighter wheel for the already long-existing two-wheelers than that people without a history of two-wheeled vehicles and with an already superior personal conveyance – the mounted horse – should find reason suddenly to invent such a vehicle in its entirety?” For comparison, in the Near East evidence “The scenarios are one of improvement and development out of an established and very useful artefact”. Littauer and Crouwel state with reason “We should like to suggest that it was the prestige value of the Near Eastern two-wheelers that inspired imitations on the steppes”.





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ak2014b says:

12th August 2018 at 18:15



The final section of Littauer & Crouwel 1996 is as instructive as the whole paper, which deserves as wide an audience as Anthony’s “The Horse” has obtained,



“A Near Eastern and a steppe origin has been previously argued by the authors (Littauer & Crouwel l979: 68-71) and by Piggott (1983: 1034) respectively. Piggott later adopted a more cautious view (1992: 48-9; cf. also Moorey 1986). The idea of the war chariot originating on the steppes has recently been revived, chiefly on the basis of the calibrated radiocarbon dates from Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero (Anthony & Vinogradov 1995: 4041).



‘ Proto-chariots’



Let us consider what is actually known of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles. At Sintashta, there remained only the imprints of the lower parts of the wheels in their slots in the floor of the burial chamber (FIGURE 1); Krivoe Ozero also preserved imprints of parts of the axle and naves. At Sintashta, the wheel tracks and their position relative to the walls of the tomb chamber limited the dimensions of the naves, hence the stability of the vehicle. Ancient naves were symmetrical, the part outside the spokes of equal length to that inside. Allowing enough room for the end of the axle arm and linch pin on the outer side of the nave and for a short spacer on the inner side of the nave end to keep it from rubbing on the body of the vehicle, we are left with no more than 20 cm for the entire length of the nave. The shortest ancient nave of which we know on a two-wheeler is 34 cm in length, and the great majority are 40-45 cm (Littauer & Crouwel 1985: 76, 91). The long naves of ancient two-wheelers were required by the material used: wooden naves revolving on wooden axles cannot fit tightly, as recent metal ones do. The short, hence loosely fitting nave will have a tendency to wobble, and it was in order to reduce this that the nave was lengthened. A wobbling nave will soon damage all elements of the wheel and put all parts of the vehicle under stress. If the vehicle should hit a boulder or a tree stump, the wheel rim would lose its verticality and, so close to the side of the body, could damage that as well as itself. The present reconstructions of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles above the axle level raise many doubts and questions, but one cannot argue about something for which there is no evidence (FIGURE 4). It is from the wheeltrack measurements and the dimensions and positions of the wheels alone that we may legitimately draw conclusions and these are alone sufficient to establish that the Sintashta-Petrovka vehicles would not be manoeuvrable enough for use either in warfare or in racing.“



And in the introductory section, the authors already summarised the above conclusions with “these dimensions would render the vehicle impractical at speed and limit its manoeuvrability. These cannot yet be true chariots.“



Littauer and Crouwel have extensive familiarity with the mechanics of wheeled vehicles. Anthony and various others may have more general knowledge of it, but this has led to unsustainable conclusions.



I think these practical, evidence-based conclusions also override the experimentally derived ones from Chechushkov et al 2018. Maybe one of the reasons the Sintashta vehicles did not develop beyond grave goods is because they weren’t very usable.



There’s no support in the above extract for the views popularly expressed in various quarters about Sintashta being “warrior badasses” on account of their two-wheeled vehicles. If they’d have invested as much time in reading the research on it as they have in promulgating mistaken views about it, they would have discovered the Sintashta vehicle may have proved a liability rather than an advantage in warfare.



The chariot from 2500 bc that Rob’s linked page cited from Littauer was referred to in general terms as a chariot. My understanding has been that the true chariots in the Middle East were to be from around 200 years after the upper limit of Anthony’s date for the Sintashta vehicles.



I recommend the full Littauer & Crouwel 1996 paper. Its introduction additionally may be referring to the earliest Near/Middle East war or true chariot, when it mentions this contrastively against the ones that had been claimed as true and war chariots in Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero.



It definitely mentions very early spoked wheels in Mesopotamia that become older than the Sintashta one if the latter’s spoked wheel imprints are from 1600 bc instead of 2000 bc. However, without needing confirmation for Sintashta’s early date, Littauer and Crouwel provided reasoned arguments why the Near/Middle East is nevertheless the more likely source for the invention of spoked wheels.





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ak2014b says:

13th August 2018 at 14:03



> I can’t really have a final take on where did true chariots originate without carefully re-examining all the data (and even then I might still have no certainty about it), but my take is that it’s not a fundamental thing regarding historical events.



I agree there’s no actual final answer to the question of origination with what data we have presently. But the value of the steppe evidence has been over presented.



My comments about chariots and spoked wheels are not to make any case about their relevance to IE or human history, but rather concern the documentation of history. There’s too little actual evidence from Sintashta to justifiably compete with the clear and well-dated evidence we have from the Near East for both innovations. Even so, the steppe is still accredited both popularly and in many research works up to the present for originating spoked wheels as well as true chariots. It is a great assumption that rests on too many uncertainties. (And there is simply no need for it when there are better alternatives for consideration.)



A certainty we do have is that the steppe had spoked wheels, somewhere between 2000-1800 bc else 1600 bc. Using Anthony’s dates from the horse bones, which are the earliest that may be assigned to the vehicles, this being still 2000-1800 bc as per the cited paper, the interval makes it contemporaneous with the evidence of vehicles with 2 spoked wheels from Anatolia and Mesopotamia that were harnessed to equids. The paper by Littauer and Crouwel contains an image from Anatolia from the early 2nd millennium bc, showing a figure carrying a weapon standing on a vehicle with 2 spoked wheels. (The harnessed draft animals further look to be horses not asses in my interpretation.)



Consider again this statement from Littauer & Crouwel 1996,

“Let us consider what is actually known of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles. At Sintashta, there remained only the imprints of the lower parts of the wheels in their slots in the floor of the burial chamber (FIGURE 1); Krivoe Ozero also preserved imprints of parts of the axle and naves.”



Therefore the totality of the evidence from the steppes is comprised of imprints from the lower part of the vehicles: the [lower parts of the] wheels, axle and the wheel hubs (naves). The rest of the steppe vehicles have been entirely reconstructed by researchers: as chariots, even though the same and actual evidence lends itself equally to their reconstructions as carts, as Littauer pointed out earlier.



Littauer & Crouwel 1996 found the reconstructed portions questionable, “The present reconstructions of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles above the axle level raise many doubts and questions”. Nevertheless, the paper’s authors allowed for both the reconstructions and the earliest dates (those of the horse bones assigned to the vehicle) in order to come to the conclusion that, despite this, the two wheeled steppe vehicles were still not true or war chariots. The authors made these allowances for the sake of argument. There is no real reason to continue making them when considering the earliest indisputable evidence available for both spoked wheels and chariots.



Clear cut evidence may conceivably turn up in the future, possibly from the steppe, that dislodges the Middle East from its present position as attesting to the currently oldest instance(s) and being the tentative origin for the true chariot and spoked wheels. Until such a time though, I believe the ancient Near East and not the steppe ought to be recognised as holding this position, whether the innovations themselves be important in any sense or not.



I’m sorry to have consumed so much of your time with this, the point was a more general one and may not have stood out given the context of aDNA and IE.





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ak2014b says:

13th August 2018 at 14:23



I remember a couple of remaining questions I had. It concerns the following extract from nytimes.com/1994/02/22/science/remaking-the-wheel-evolution-of-the-chariot.html



“Chariot technology, Dr. Muhly noted, seems to have left an imprint on Indo-European languages and could help solve the enduring puzzle of where they originated. All of the technical terms connected with wheels, spokes, chariots and horses are represented in the early Indo-European vocabulary, the common root of nearly all modern European languages as well as those of Iran and India.



In which case, Dr. Muhly said, chariotry may well have developed before the original Indo-European speakers scattered. And if chariotry came first in the steppes east of the Urals, that could be the long-sought homeland of Indo-European languages. Indeed, fast spoke-wheeled vehicles could have been used to begin the spread of their language not only to India but to Europe.”



[That's obviously a big fat lie: only 4 wheeled ceremonial-only vehicles on the steppe, until 2 wheeled carts appeared out of nowhere during the later steppe kultur of Sintashta of 2100-1800 BCE. No sign of local development of 2 wheeled vehicles, so rather than innovation, obviously imported.

No evidence for chariots in Sintashta, only for non-working 2 wheeled carts that would break on impact: "A wobbling nave will soon damage all elements of the wheel and put all parts of the vehicle under stress. If the vehicle should hit a boulder or a tree stump, the wheel rim would lose its verticality and, so close to the side of the body, could damage that as well as itself." (Littauer and Crouwel again)

So even late steppe isn't origin of chariots, let alone early steppe. If chariotry was shared across all PIE as Muhly fibs above, then the steppe still can't ever be made into PIE homeland. Tragic, but it's the corollary.

But what the fact that Sintashta didn't have chariots means for Hindu heathens is that: so not Indo-Iranian by IEists own rules. Of course, IIEists will still believe, because you know, beliebers.]



Firstly, is it true that vocabulary related to chariots is shared in Indo-European? The discussions on eurogenes led me to believe that chariots were originally associated with Indo-Iranian.



Second, the current situation is that there are yet no definite chariots in the steppes, since the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero may as likely be carts. What seems to me more pertinent is there was no tradition of two wheeled vehicles in the steppes until these finds, going by the extracts from Littauer & Crouwer 1996 further above. (It was one of the reasons Littauer and Crouwer argued that two-wheeled vehicles on the steppes were inspired by those in the Near East, thereby also explaining their sudden appearance on the steppe.)



As chariots are two-wheeled vehicles, do the first and second points not conflict? If, as Izbitser’s work based on the evidence of wheeled vehicles in the steppe is to have argued, the steppe were inhabited by “people without a history of two-wheeled vehicles” (Littauer & Crouwer 1996) until the Sintashta era finds marked a distinct change, how may the chariot terminology be part of “the early Indo-European vocabulary, the common root of nearly all modern European languages as well as those of Iran and India”?



If not the immediate conclusion that the steppes as a consequence cannot be the homeland (or that chariot is not part of the PIE or LPIE vocabulary), maybe the argument has to become that chariots were borrowed early on into PIE, to explain the absence of the development of two-wheeled on the steppe? However, won’t the same long-term absence of two-wheeled vehicles in the steppes condense the timeline for PIE in a steppe homeland?





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Alberto says:

13th August 2018 at 16:58



@ak2014b



As far as I know, it’s the words related to wheeled vehicles in general and not to chariots in particular (except for the word for horse itself) that is considered part of PIE (or better to say, late PIE, since Anatolian languages don’t share this vocabulary). The article from Anthony and Ringe linked in the post have a more detailed discussion about the terms and their appearance in each daughter language.



...

Quote:(0) “Let us consider what is actually known of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles. At Sintashta, there remained only the imprints of the lower parts of the wheels in their slots in the floor of the burial chamber (FIGURE 1); Krivoe Ozero also preserved imprints of parts of the axle and naves.”

Quote:(1) "The present reconstructions of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles above the axle level raise many doubts and questions, but one cannot argue about something for which there is no evidence (FIGURE 4). It is from the wheeltrack measurements and the dimensions and positions of the wheels alone that we may legitimately draw conclusions and these are alone sufficient to establish that the Sintashta-Petrovka vehicles would not be manoeuvrable enough for use either in warfare or in racing."

Quote:(2) "these dimensions would render the vehicle impractical at speed and limit its manoeuvrability. These cannot yet be true chariots."

Quote:(3) until Sintashta, "no early tradition of fast transport by two-wheeler existed on the steppe", summarising Izbitser’s work (1993).

Quote:(4) “We should like to suggest that it was the prestige value of the Near Eastern two-wheelers that inspired imitations on the steppes”.

Quote:We do not have the horse in the Indus Civilization. [1]

There is no evidence for the wheeled chariot. [2]

There is no evidence for the spoked wheels. [3]

Quote:true horse bones were recovered from several Harappan sites belonging to the mature Harappan levels which were securely dated between 2700 BC to the 2000 BC and which had nothing to do with the so called migrations of some fictitious Aryan tribes. Every evidence of horse that was unearthed from a Harappan site dated before 2000 BC was doubted and the competency of the scholars who identified them were also questioned. A significant incident can be cited in this connection. In a 1974 article 5, A.K. Sharma, an expert in faunal studies, identified the remains of true domesticated horse from the mature Harappan level of Surkotada, a prominent Harappan site of Gujarat. But Sharma’s claim lacked widespread acceptance as migrationist scholars stamped the specimens as onager or wild ass. After some 20 years, a renowned archaeologist and horse specialist of Hungarian origin, Sandor Bökönyi, came to India and confirmed Sharma’s identification after examining the said specimens.6



The aggrieved Sharma then reacted: “This was the saddest day for me as the thought flashed in my mind that my findings had to wait two decades for recognition, until a man from another continent came, examined the material and declared that ‘Sharma was right’. When will we imbibe intellectual courage not to look across borders for approval? The historians are still worse, they feel it is an attempt on the part of the ‘rightists’ to prove that the Aryans did not come to India from outside her boundaries.”7

Quote:"Perhaps the most convincing example of a spoked wheel comes from the site of Rahkigarhi, presumably from the Harappan levels (Figure 8:2) though the excavation report has not yet been published. In this example there are eleven radiating spokes that would have provided considerable support to a light outer rim." [p.11, referring to Figure 8:2 on p29 of PDF]

Quote:"Early spoked wheels in the steppes



The spoked wheel, together with horse draught and the bitted bridle, are usually considered the essentials of the war, hunting and (later) racing chariot, but it can be shown that these features alone are not enough. 1 The recent calibrated radiocarbon dating to c. 2000-1800 BC of light, horse-drawn vehicles from Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero, in northern Kazakhstan just east of the Urals, has revived the claim that the chariot originated in the steppe area rather than somewhere in the Near East (Gening et al. 1992; Kuzmina 1994: 163-457; Anthony 1995: 561-2; Anthony & Vinogradov 1985). The burials from which the northern datings come contain the remains of horses and the bone cheekpieces of soft-mouthed bits, of the vehicles there are in most cases only the impressions of their two, spoked wheels as placed standing in the graves (FIGURE 1). The earliest southern documentation is provided by cylinder-seal impressions from the time of Karum II at Kültepe, central Anatolia, usually dated to the early 2nd millennium BC (FIGURE a), and by a terracotta plaque from Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, possibly of slightly later date (Littauer & Crouwell979: figures 28-30; Garelli & Collon 1975: no. 46). The latter show equid-drawn vehicles with two spoked wheels. We do not know what superstructure the Ural vehicles had. The soil impressions of the wheels, placed vertically in especially made slots in the bottom of the burial chamber, when combined with the dimensions of the chamber, give two basic measurements: the wheel-track or gauge (the distance between the wheels, 120 cm) and the maximum length of the nave (20 cm). As explained later, these dimensions would render the vehicle impractical at speed and limit its manoeuvrability. These cannot yet be true chariots. The Anatolian seal impressions and Uruk plaque show small passenger vehicles with light railings.



1 The chariot may be defined as a light, fast, usually horse-drawn vehicle with two spoked wheels; its crew usually stood."



"The earliest southern documentation is provided by cylinder-seal impressions from the time of Karum II at Kültepe, central Anatolia, usually dated to the early 2nd millennium BC (FIGURE a), and by a terracotta plaque from Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, possibly of slightly later date (Littauer & Crouwell979: figures 28-30; Garelli & Collon 1975: no. 46). The latter show equid-drawn vehicles with two spoked wheels."



"The issues: progress vs invention



The steppes also had burials with wheeled vehicles, in the Pit-Grave culture of the late 4th and 3rd millennia BC - ox-drawn wagons with four disc wheels. A re-examination of all the pertinent documents and material forms the basis of a recent doctoral dissertation for the Institute of Archaeology of St Petersburg by Yelena Izbitser (1993). Several new facts have emerged. Wherever the superstructure can be deduced, it has turned out to be rather light, and for a seated passenger. But these vehicles would not have been fast, and their range even more limited than that of two-wheelers. A sec ond conclusion is more significant. Hitherto, when an irregular number of wheels (beyond four) have been found in a few graves, it has suggested the presence also of two-wheelers. Dr Izbitser’s examination has shown that these wheels belonged to other four-wheelers. If she is correct in her readings, it means that no early tradition of fast transport by two-wheeler existed on the steppe.



What also seems to emerge from Dr Izbitser’s work is that many of the four-wheeled vehicles buried with seated passengers would have been more suitable for processions and for burial rites than for workaday use. These must have been ceremonial, status-conferring vehicles.

In the Near East, however, by the later 3rd millennium BC, fast, single-person, equid-drawn two-wheelers had been in use for many centuries. The domestic horse is depicted there by the 23rd-21st centuries BC, to judge particularly from the terracotta figurine of a stallion recently found at Tell es-Sweyhat in Syria (Holland 1993-4: 283, figure 111). This animal’s muzzle was pierced in an area that could only be for a bit (not a nose-ring) and he was associated with models of wheeled vehicles. When the horse was ridden, it was still with the ‘donkey’ seat, and horse-back riding continued to be considered unsuitable for the Blite (Moorey 1970; Littauer & Crouwel1979: 45-6,65-8; Owen 1991).

But an animal faster, stronger and handsomer than the native donkey soon found his appropriate role - in draught with that traditionally prestigious conveyance - the wheeled vehicle. Does it not seem more likely that the horse’s introduction to draught in the Near East stimulated the local wheelwrights to invent a lighter wheel for the already long-existing two-wheelers than that people without a history of two-wheeled vehicles and with an already superior personal conveyance - the mounted horse - should find reason suddenly to invent such a vehicle in its entirety?"



"We should like to suggest that it was the prestige value of the Near Eastern two-wheelers that inspired imitations on the steppes".



"The chariot, moreover, was costly to make and to maintain, and draught teams had to be especially trained and to be matched in height and stride (Piggott 1992: 42-8)."





‘ Proto-chariots’

Let us consider what is actually known of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles. At Sintashta, there remained only the imprints of the lower parts of the wheels in their slots in the floor of the burial chamber (FIGURE 1); Krivoe Ozero also preserved imprints of parts of the axle and naves. At Sintashta, the wheel tracks and their position relative to the walls of the tomb chamber limited the dimensions of the naves, hence the stability of the vehicle. Ancient naves were symmetrical, the part outside the spokes of equal length to that inside. Allowing enough room for the end of the axle arm and linch pin on the outer side of the nave and for a short spacer on the inner side of the nave end to keep it from rubbing on the body of the vehicle, we are left with no more than 20 cm for the entire length of the nave. The shortest ancient nave of which we know on a two-wheeler is 34 cm in length, and the great majority are 40-45 cm (Littauer & Crouwell985: 76, 91). The long naves of ancient two-wheelers were required by the material used: wooden naves revolving on wooden axles cannot fit tightly, as recent metal ones do. The short, hence loosely fitting nave will have a tendency to wobble, and it was in order to reduce this that the nave was lengthened. A wobbling nave will soon damage all elements of the wheel and put all parts of the vehicle under stress. If the vehicle should hit a boulder or a tree stump, the wheel rim would lose its verticality and, so close to the side of the body, could damage that as well as itself. The present reconstructions of the Sintashta and Krivoe Ozero vehicles above the axle level raise many doubts and questions, but one cannot argue about something for which there is no evidence (FIGURE 4). It is from the wheeltrack measurements and the dimensions and positions of the wheels alone that we may legitimately draw conclusions and these are alone sufficient to establish that the Sintashta-Petrovka vehicles would not be manoeuvrable enough for use either in warfare or in racing."

Quote: ak2014b says:

12th January 2019 at 17:14



...the informative Jonathan Sherman Morris paper “Wheels, Languages and Bullshit (Or How Not To Do Linguistic Archaeology)” (2018) ingentaconnect.com/content/plg/phil/2018/00000019/00000001/art00003# that Alberto helpfully pointed out. I’ve quickly skimmed the first third of that paper and several points immediately stood out, one of which was the following paragraph on p. 73,



“Georgiev nevertheless describes an Anatolian substrate in Greek toponyms detectable in the -ss- and -nd- suffixes South of Mount Pindos, but not North of it (Georgiev, 1960, pp. 285–297). If the Anatolians really did migrate down the Balkans from North to South, the last thing one would expect to find is an east-west linguistic frontier of this kind.



This migration ostensibly makes the Anatolians latecomers to Anatolia, who fell under the influence of indigenous Hattic and Hurrian speak-ers, but the same JIES 2001 volume contains an illuminating contribution by Margalit Finkelberg (2001), who makes a persuasive case that Linear A, attested in Crete and Mycenae, is an Anatolian language. In other words, the case for a long-standing presence of Anatolian in Western Anatolia and the Aegean (where there is no evidence for Hattic or Hurrian) looks like a strong one. Her paper is not mentioned either by Anthony or by Lewis and Pereltsvaig, even though it is hard to imagine that they were unaware of it, since it is in the same volume as the Darden paper.

[Like I said, steppists - even the professional full-time steppists, not just the bloggers - are notorious for ignoring, suppressing else dismissing off-hand any arguments inconvenient to steppism. Anthony went with the first - i.e. ignoring - as he and his Harvard connections now repeatedly do with Littauer & Crouwel's expose of Anthony's non-chariots in Sintashta.]



In other words, there is good evidence for a long-standing presence of Anatolian in Western Anatolia and an expansion to the West, but none for a migration from the Pontic Steppes down the Balkans.“

[color="#800080"][Note the entire block italicised above is an excerpt from Sherman's "Wheels, Language and Bullshit", which despite the title is actually a scholarly sendup of that unscholarly fraud Anthony, whose work "Horse, wheel (spiel)" deserves no better review/critique title. Personally, rather than "Bullshit", I think Sherman should go with "Horse Manure", but first he may have wanted actual proof that the horses ancestral to modern horses are actually endemic and exclusively so to the steppes, something that's been repeatedly claimed but not actually shown, and not merely introduced there, say. After all, so many other steppist "truths" claimed for the steppe have turned out to be hot air and essentially forgeries. Maybe Sherman is like me and now disbelieves any claims that promote steppe PIE until verified, rather than assuming they're true until disproven.][/color]



There’s actually two or three points of interest in this very extract, but I refer particularly to how Linear A is concluded to have been an Anatolian language by Finkelberg.



The Wikipedia entry for Linear A, “Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization.”



Anthrogenica and the rest of the genetics blogosphere have recently been insistent that Linear A is absolutely not Indo-European (and by consequence, neither the Minoans), but if Linear A turns out to have been of an Anatolian language and therefore Indo-European, then does it not have far reaching implications?



I have now been able to read the cited Margalit Finkelberg paper, The Language of Linear A: Greek, Semitic, or Anatolian? R. Drews (ed.), Greater Anatolia and Indo-European Language Family. Papers presented at a Colloquium Hosted by the University of Richmond, March 18-19, 2000. Journal of Indo-European Studies. Monograph Series 38 (Washington 2001).

academia.edu/24273902/The_Language_of_Linear_A_Greek_Semitic_or_Anatolian



Finkelberg’s arguments are indeed very effective and convincing.



The author has made this excellent paper available for reading. I will therefore just go over her conclusions from her findings.



For Linear A, she systematically rules out not only Greek, Semitic and Hurrian, but also Hattic and Sumerian. She then proceeds to make positive identification with Anatolian languages in specific, to be able to conclude,



“It can therefore be inferred with a considerable degree of certainty that the language of Linear A is an Anatolian language.” (page 95)



And after Finkelberg narrows it down even further, she is even able to reasonably surmise



“There is thus a high degree of correspondence between the phonological and morphological system of Minoan and that of Lycian. In view of this, there seems reason to conclude that the language of Linear A is either the direct ancestor of Lycian or a closely related idiom.” (page 98)



My request is for Finkelberg’s findings to be discussed by Kristiina, with her linguistic expertise, and by Frank, Rob and of course Alberto with their knowledge in archaeology and/or from their study.



If Minoan civilisation spoke a language of the Anatolian language family, and was therefore Indo-European, it opens up interesting questions related to aDNA too, which I hope will be addressed. For instance, how does Linear A as Anatolian/IE inform the results from the still limited number of Bronze Age samples from Greece? I think the Lazaridis et al 2017 paper found that Mycenaeans and Minoans significantly shared one component, and this had been argued away in the genetics blogosphere as being the non Indo-European portion of their heritage, whereas much was made of the relatively minor steppe portion that was to be exclusive to the Mycenaeans.



However, if the Minoans’ Linear A script points to an Anatolian language (and not any of the many non Indo-European languages and language families that were in the vicinity), then does that not rather make that part of the genetic heritage that is shared by both Minoans and Mycenaeans actually gain in relevance where Indo-European is concerned?





ak2014b says:

13th January 2019 at 18:04



A popular assumption current is that only aDNA from Anatolia that shows steppe would be truly representative of Indo-European ancestry. And with it the argument has been that it is an absolute given that Minoans’ Linear A is not IE and therefore Minoans are not IE, that therefore any Anatolian heritage shared with Minoans dismisses such Anatolian heritage from IE. This is why I was surprised with Finkelberg 2001, and how we don’t in fact know that Minoans/Linear A are not IE, and that they may in fact be IE, Anatolian in specific.

...

[color="#800080"][Actually, Finkelberg shows rather conclusively that Linear A and therefore Minoans are IE, specifically Anatolian.][/color]





Marko says:

14th January 2019 at 23:49



Regarding Mehmet’s comments, this is an interesting quote from Finkelberg’s Greeks and Pre-Greeks:



“Moreover, as Onofrio Carruba has shown in a recent article, Luwian is the

only substratum language that can be traced west of a line drawn from the

Bosporus in the north to the Gulf of Alexandretta in the south, that is,

over the entire territory of Asia Minor.12 In view of these facts, it is hard

to avoid the conclusion that the orthodoxy of the non-Indo-European

pre-Hellenic substratum has lost its raison d’eˆtre.”

(Bear in mind that Luwian is an Anatolian language, i.e. an IE language. Meaning the pre-Hellenic substratum in Greek is noticeably or significantly or largely IE.

So say experts on Ancient Greek and Anatolian language/culture/history. (In contrast, Anthony's expertise is to defer to *Doniger* of all people for "Sanskrit" translations. And even Witzel made fun of Doniger's "expertise" in this.)

Yet arguments by actual experts like Finkelberg only get ignored by steppists, in the hopes that then they won't get heard by the populace.

So heathen Hindoos, make sure you hear it. And then when the IIEists blather - as they do - that you should read Anthony, you know exactly how "well-read" they are, and how much they can actually think for themselves, or find and look up serious published works.)





With the ancient DNA from Asia Minor accumulating, another author worth looking at might be Petra Goedegebuure. She actually bothered to learn Hattian, and her findings seem to upend long-held notions about indigenous Hattians in Anatolia: according to her there is a Luwian-like substrate in Hattian, suggesting that before the Hittites usurped Hattian power the latter subdued an Indo-European Anatolian people. This leads me to question whether it is possible that the increase in the CHG component observed in Chalcolithic Anatolia might be the signal of Hattian invaders rather than that of the Indo-Europeans as Reich and colleagues seem to believe.

Quote:More rule than exception: Parallel evidence of ancient migrations in grammars and genomes of Finno-Ugric speakers

Patrícia Santos, Gloria Gonzalez-Fortes, Emiliano Trucchi, Andrea Ceolin, Guido Cordoni, Cristina Guardiano, Giuseppe Longobardi, Guido Barbujani

doi: https: // doi.org/10.1101/2020.11.02.364521

This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?].



AbstractFull TextInfo/HistoryMetrics

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Abstract



To reconstruct aspects of human demographic history, linguistics and genetics complement each other, reciprocally suggesting testable hypotheses on population relationships and interactions. Relying on a linguistic comparative method exclusively based on syntactic data, here we focus on the complex relation of genes and languages among Finno-Ugric (FU) speakers, in comparison to their Indo-European (IE) and Altaic (AL) neighbors. Syntactic analysis supports three distinct clusters corresponding to these three Eurasian families; yet, the outliers of the FU group show linguistic convergence with their geographical neighbors. By analyzing genome-wide data in both ancient and contemporary populations, we uncovered remarkably matching patterns, with north-western FU speakers linguistically and genetically closer in parallel degrees to their IE-speaking neighbors, and eastern FU speakers to AL-speakers. Therefore, our study indicates plausible secondary convergence in the syntax of languages of different families, providing evidence that such interference effects were accompanied, and possibly caused, by recognizable processes at the population level. In particular, based on the comparison of modern and ancient genomes, our analysis identified the Pontic-Caspian steppes as the possible origin of the demographic processes that led to the expansion of the FU into Europe.



...

As for Indo-European, despite a long tradition of studies, it is still debated whether early IE languages came into Europe from the Pontic-Caspian steppes (and spread west in the Bronze Age [24,25]) or from Anatolia (and spread with the dispersal of early Neolithic farmers [14,26]). Thus, we compared the syntax and the genomes of several AL-FU- and IE-speaking populations with the available genome-wide data, both contemporary and ancient, in the area of interest [27]. Of particular interest was one Bronze-Age population from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the Yamnaya, the likely source of the Bronze-Age migration leading to a Westwards diffusion of DNA of Central Asian origin and, according to some authors, of IE languages in Europe [28–30]. By contrast, a recent analysis of Asian genomes suggested that the spread of IE languages in South Asia and Anatolia may have little, if anything, to do, with migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppes [31]. An analogous uncertainty surrounds the homeland of early Uralic-speakers, whether in the river Volga basin [25] or further East, in Siberia [32].



...

The genomic similarity between the Yamnaya and the first FU speakers of Europe may be difficult to reconcile with the view that the Yamnaya were also the first who introduced IE languages in Europe, as suggested by studies of genomic, not linguistic, data [28,29]. One possibility, supported by a study of Iberia [61], is that the arrival in Europe of the Steppe genomic component did not necessarily entail the same linguistic changes in all areas. In the absence of adequate data to formally test this hypothesis, we still may speculate that the small, but non-negligible, ancestry component associated with the Anatolian Neolithic [31] among the Yamnaya may reflect previous Northward gene flow from the Near East into the Pontic steppes. If so, it would be possible to reconcile genetic evidence for the Neolithic demic diffusion from the Near East, linguistic evidence on a Near East centre of IE diffusion [14,26,31,58,62], and data suggesting a role of Yamnaya people in spreading both IE [28,29,63], and FU (this study) languages, by imagining the existence of some linguistic diversity within the Yamnaya-like populations and concluding that IE languages have entered Europe in two moments and by two routes. The first one would correspond to the main Neolithic expansion, Northwest into Southern and then Central Europe, but also North, towards the Pontic Steppes. The linguistic impact of this migration would have not been the same for all people in the Pontic steppes; some would retain their original FU languages, some would acquire an IE language. The former would then mostly move towards the Baltic and Finnish area, whereas the latter would correspond to the IE-speaking populations dispersing in Europe in the Bronze Age [29,64], giving rise to the Bell Beaker and Corded Ware cultures.



...



31. de Barros Damgaard, P., Martiniano, R., Kamm, J., Moreno-Mayar, J.V., Kroonen, G., Peyrot, M., Barjamovic, G., Rasmussen, S., Zacho, C., Baimukhanov, N., et al. The first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe expansions into Asia. Science 2018, 360, doi:10.1126/science.aar7711.

Quote:The author presents new radiocarbon dates for chariot burials found in the region between Europe and the Urals, showing them to belong to the twentieth-eighteenth centuries BCE.

Quote:In 1951, when Childe published his well-known paper on "The First Waggons and Carts--from the Tigris to the Severn' he cited a cylinder seal carved with a chariot scene, from Tepe Hissar in eastern Iran, as one of the earliest representations of a spoked wheel.1

...

Though the cutting of the seal is crude and stylized it may be shown, by comparing the form of this wheel with contemporary excavated wheels from Iran and by uniting this scene with other glyptic of the same type, that the wheel is almost certainly not spoked and that the cylinder seal need not be later than c. 2350 B.C.

...

(A little later in the article he goes on to describe the wheel as essentially a crossbar wheel, which is also the description of it by others to this day. Note: in case you don't know, crossbar wheels are said to be the precursor to the spoked wheel.



The above and following excerpted paras confirm a longstanding presence/local development of cross-bar wheels in the Near East, i.e. all 3rd millennia BCE.)



Childe examined in detail the evidence for wheel forms in Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium BC when they were not only commonly shown on baked clay or metal model chariots, on cylinder seals, mosaic panels and monuments, but actual chariots or wagons were placed in graves at Ur and Kish in Iraq and at Susa in Iran. Indeed it is some well preserved wheels from Susa which provide a vital clue to the actual form of the wheel rendered on the Hissar cylinder seal.