Re: Odp: Cowboys on Horseback

junk

Piotr & Mark, may I give my view (for what it's worth)? There's firm evidence IMO that the beaker peoples spoke PIE (Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celto-Italic). We see the corded ware of Ukraine ca.3000 BC progress to the Rhine delta ca.2800; there it changed into bell beakers; then north unto Scotland, and south via the Rhone valley to S-France ca.2500 & then unto Portugal & Sicily (Sherrat). We know a lot about these peoples (Sherrat): horse, sheep & wool, ox wain, wooden houses (timber=domus), full wooden wheels, hempen rope, barley, yeast, kurgans, weapons... Perhaps the horse, wain, yeast (food conservation?) & woolen cloths suggest they were extensive & mobile farmers (after all they probably were semi-nomadics that had adopted agriculture). The barley suggests that in the N-European plains they perhaps occupied at first the less fertile hills (the earlier farmers occupied the fertile valleys (loess)), perhaps they burned the woods for their sheep & cattle (& barley?). In this sense I see them as some sort of cowboys or at least sheep-boys, that perhaps wandered in the region around their father's farm. IMO they did not necessarily immediately dominate the earlier farmers in the valleys, perhaps that came only after centuries, but probably the horse riding (cf. hempen ropes?) gave them a strategic dominance over the earlier populations. Genetically they're still a minority (Cavalli-Sforza), but the earlier populations adopted their language, which explains the wide differences between the N+W-European IE languages. We don't know when the earlier populations adopted the IE languages, that was probably only centuries, perhaps even 1-2 millennia after the beaker peoples entered Europe (the Basks still haven't adopted it, and the process was still going on in the first centuries BC in Italy (Etrusks)). Just an impression after reading Sherrat. It's not clear to me how much their were agriculturalists & how much they were herders & how both could be mixed, but in the Far West the economy was also based upon both farming & herding.

Marc

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Mark (?) said: I believe it was the Indo-Europeans who perfected the technique of managing free-ranging stock on horseback, sometime around or just before 2500 BCE. Combined with sturdy, steppe-worthy carts, this allowed them to expand enormously -- both in terms of geographic expanse and in terms of absolute numbers. They were filling what had been an unfilled ecological niche. They were a well-fed (and consequently, fertile) people.

I think it really was a Big Bang. The only real historic parallel would be the expansion of the European population of the US westwards of the Appalachians (and probably, the Russification of Siberia during the same period). It took us less than 100 years to fill a continent, most of it accomplished with little more than ox-drawn carts and wagons. In 1865, a single dominant language was spoken from San Francisco to Baltimore, more than 3000 miles. About 2500 BCE, a single dominant language was spoken for at least an equivalent distance, and probably an even greater one. Excluding the problems encountered with Anatolic and Germanic, all known Indo-European languages are neatly explained by such a scenario.

Dear Mark, The domestication of European cattle took place some 8500 years ago, antedating the first horsemen by millennia. The first neolithic communities of Western, Central and Northern Europe already kept cattle derived from the local subspecies of the aurochs. I agree that the tending of herds was rendered much more effective by the introduction of horse-riding; but at the time when the first mounted cowboys appeared in Central Europe pastoralism was regularly practised by much of its farming population. Riding was by no means the principal use of the horse immediately after its domestication; it was used mainly as a draught animal -- and eaten, too. Now, the advantage that riders had over pedestrian cowherds was obvious in the case of large free-ranging herds in the open grasslands of the Pontic area, Central Asia or modern Hungary, but for equally obvious reasons nomadic pastoralism could not become the dominant occupation of the ancestor of the Germani, Balts, Slavs, Italici or Celts. How did your cowboys manage to dominate woodland Europe linguistically without being able to deploy their economic advantages? The American South and the Plains were colonised by people with a central political power to back them up, and with superior technology (from the cotton gin and modern firearms to the telegraph and the railway in the later phase of the conquest); so was Siberia. The linguistic domination of Latin in much of Roman Europe was achieved thanks to the combined military, political, ideological and economic strength of the empire. The contrast between the Pontic horsemen and the European farmers was of a different nature, even if the former were warlike and heroic-minded. They could raid and pillage, perhaps marry into the local elites, but I do not think they were capable of imposing permanent power structures. And even if they were, they would not necessarily retain their language in the process. England is not French-speaking, after all. The only IE Big Bang I can imagine in connection with horse-riding was the Aryan one, involving as the most important ethnic element the Iranian-speaking tribes. With my chronology of IE dispersals THAT was what happened before 2000 BC. The later Turkic, Mongolian and Ugric Big Bangs were secondary to it; again, their lasting effects were typically restricted to areas where the natural conditions were favourable to nomadic pastoralism. The Huns for a few decades managed to harass and debilitate the Roman Empire, collect an annual tribute from Rome and help themselves to the wealth of the provinces, but after Attila's death the Hunnish dominion evaporated. Piotr