--- In cybalist@..., george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
> Frankly I don't give too
> much credence to a lot of very recent re-evaluations.
> Not yet anyway. Marsha Levine's article on Dereivka is
> a case in point. It sounds promising until you realize
> that a lot of material noted in the Telegin study has
> simply been ignored: not rejected, just ignored. Like
> the horse bits.******
I may be wrong but it would seem that the surprise re-dating of the
often cited Dereivka horse skull to the iron age would justify a
degree of re-evaluating across the board. As far as Dereivka horse
bits, where are they and have they been lab-dated? Furthermore, where
are all the similar horsebits that should be lying somewhere around
Europe between these circa 3500 BC dates and the bronze age? Have any
been found west of the Ukraine? Shouldn't they be there?
As to Yamna, I read in Levine, Rassamakin, Kislenko and Tatarintseva,
"Late prehistoric exploitation of the Eurasian steppe," (David Brown
1998) that Yuri Rassamakin not only found no evidence to indicate
horses were harnessed or ridden in the region in the early bronze age,
but that the horse "is virtually absent from the Yamnaya
archaeological record."
Ten years ago I had some faith in the the ties between Ukraine
horsemen, the last date of PIE unity and *ekwos as a paleolinguistic
proof of some kind. These days, it would nice to see the whole thing
re-evaluated from scratc