20-01-04 22:13, Richard Wordingham wrote:
> What pulled the PIE-speakers' ploughs? I am not sure that cattle
> (_Bos_, not _Ovis_) were domesticated early enough. Is it possible
> that *h2arh3trom 'plough' was formed after the PIE dispersal, as may
> have been the case with *kWekWlos 'wheel'? Could *h2arh3trom have
> actually originally meant 'hoe'?
Neither term occurs in Anatolian. *h2arh3-trom (also *harh3-dHlom >
Slavic *árdlo > *radlo) represents a highly productive pattern of
deverbal formation (from *h2arh3- 'till'), which means that it could
have been created independently in several branches. As far as I know,
the earliest archaeological evidence of ards pulled by draft animals in
Europe comes from the Funnel Beaker culture, i.e. ca. 4000 BC cal. (the
animals were oxen). They seem to have appered at about the same time as
the earliest wheeled vehicles. But domestic cattle were already raised
by the Starcevo-Koros-Cris farmers ca. 6000 BC and became the dominant
domestic animals of the Linear Pottery culture. They were domesticated
still earlier (perhaps about 7000 BC) in the Near East.
Piotr