Re: Rg Veda date

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:

>
> *****GK: As usual, Ms. Levine needs a lot of
> correcting. She does admit that the horse had been
> domesticated "for a considerable period of time" as of
> the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta burials (which begin
> ca. 2000 BCE). And then she rather "bloops" by
> casually stating that "by the mid-2nd millennium" BCE
> horse-drawn chariots were in use in the Near East...
> As a matter of fact, we know that such chariots were
> in use there at least 1,000 years earlier, as
> evidenced by the royal seals (with horses drawing the
> chariots clearly depicted) discovered at Ur and Kish,
> reliably radiocarbondated to ca. 2600 BCE (Cf. the
> reproductions in M.V. Gorelik, "Boievi kolesnitsi
> Perednogo Vostoka III-II tis. do n.e", in Drevniaia
> Anatoliia, "Nauka":Moscow, 1985, pp. 183-202.) It is
> not a major assumption to claim that "domestication"
> in Levine's sense began in Western Eurasia as early as
> the Early Bronze Age, since the presence of war
> chariots in the north has also been documented from
> Late Yamna and Catacomb burials. Even so, the
> systematic large scale use of such tamed animals
> (beginning ca. 4000 BCE)remains a quite significant
> event in the evolution of human societies.*****
>

These correctives are certainly very helpful, but I can't see that
they materially change the central issue, which is that the
distinction between taming and domestication is vital. Those are two
distinct revolutions, the former of which may very well have been a
characteristic of late PIE-speaking society, but the latter of which
would seem to be more at home in the Indo-Iranian-speaking steppe
societies (or possibly contemporary societies with a related
lifestyle).

In this connection I have a question. In reading about these matters
one often comes across claims that put the earliest examples of the
practice of taming and/or the domestication of the horse in much more
easterly areas. Usually the argument hinges on subtle issues having
to do with the dating of organic materials in archeological contexts
that don't always look very promising. Do you have an opinion on
this?

Best,


Willem