Cowboys on Horseback

I don't think Piotr or I are in much disagreement. A matter of emphasis, perhaps. Much of what I write here is speculative. I am greatly influenced by Mallory and his demand that we keep the IE homeland within credible boundaries. Having an essentially undifferentiated PIE being spoken from the headwaters of the Yenisey to the mouth of the Seine before 3500 is not possible.

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.

The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, in the article on 'Cow' states:

Domestication of of cattle began during the transition to the Neolithic economy, appearing earliest in Anatolia and Greece in the seventh millennium BC and subsequently throughout the rest of Europe, reaching northern and western Europe in the centuries before 4000 BC. Domestic cattle are also found by the sixth millennium BC north of the Caucasus as they spread through the steppe regions or were there locally domesticated from the native aurochs. [p.137]

Elsewhere it states (and this is new to me, but quite pertinent to our ongoing discussion) that *tauros meant 'aurochs' (of either sex) and then only later was the word transferred to male bovines.

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?

I don't put cowboys in the Northern European forest. I put them on the steppe, and on the plains of Hungary (and the plains of Thessaly),  where they belong. For IE cowpokes in Thessaly, we are talking of something quite late, 1900, 1800, and probably later; proto-Thracians, perhaps.

With Germanic, so I gather, the only reasonable explanation offered for the phonological and lexical peculariaties is a substrate, which suggests elite dominance. With Balto-Slavic, they've always been there, just north of the IE Homeland, and for the last 1400 years or so, they own the IE homeland. It's not necessary to say all IE speakers turned into steppe nomads. The emergence of Celtic seems to be very late, late Bronze Age, even early Iron Age (ca 1200), almost 1000 years after Greek and Armenian began to differentiate. The origin of Italic is as obscure as that of Celtic.

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.

By 1865, English was coast-to-coast. This was done mostly without railroads or the telegraph, but yes, the technological differences between 2500 BCE and 1865 CE are immense. The IE expansion in Eurasia was probably entirely unopposed: whoever lived there was co-opted by the superior economic system they brought. The US expasion westward was opposed but this was balanced by technological superiority.

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.

On the steppe, there were no farmers outside river valleys. Free-ranging livestock offered a higher standard of living.

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.

If we are to keep the post-Anatolic homeland within credible bounds, the breakup of (non-Anatolic) Indo-European is almost co-incident with the Indo-Iranian Big Bang. We still don't know enough about how well horse and man had adapted to each other at the deeper dates. By 2000, so I'm told, we have actual spoke-wheeled chariots.

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.

Attila's confederacy was a jumble of different tribes. It seems the Huns had both saddles and metal stirrups -- a technological innovation sufficient to devastate the Roman Empire, a devastation which was worse east of the Carpathians, and which led to the Slavs filling the cultural vacuum south and west of them.

The known historic pattern for the steppe is one of invasion by steppe nomads from the east, usually one people being displaced by another further east. Only in the earliest of times, when no one knew how to live on the steppe, at least up out of the river valleys, would it seem the flow went west-to-east -- though, were we to place the IE homeland in the Volga-Samara-Ural region, the pattern would hold true to type, at least for Europe.

Mark.