With the deluge of bad news and the evil machinations of despotic men, it seems a good time to start a new book.

I've read "Guns, Germs, And Steel," but I haven't read °The Horse, The Wheel, And Language" yet, so now is as good a time as any.

BTW, the wheel was known in pre-Columbian America, but wasn't used for transportation as there were no suitable draft animals.


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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Language

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World is a 2007 book by the anthropologist David W. Anthony, in which the author describes his "revised Kurgan theory." He explores the origins and spread of the Indo-European languages from the Pontic–Caspian steppe throughout Western Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. He shows how the domesticated horse and the invention of the wheel mobilized the steppe herding societies in the Eurasian Steppe, and combined with the introduction of bronze technology and new social structures of patron-client relationships gave an advantage to the Indo-European societies. The book won the Society for American Archaeology's 2010 Book Award.[1]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2025 01:06AM by anybody.

I've read that book multiple times. It is better than any archaeological treatment of the Indo-Europeans before it, including Renfew, Mallory, and Gimbutas, and does a great job on the linguistics as well.

What is even more exciting is what Anthony did after that publication: he left Hartwick and joined David Reich's group at Harvard, where they have added genetic analysis to the mix of archaeology and linguistics. They are co-authors on a number of very important papers, including The Southern Arc, which radically changed the understanding of the relationship between the proto-Anatolian languages and the PIE family; and also put the origin of the two branches not in the steppe river valleys, which was the previous consensus, but in the Caucasus mountains.

Anything either of those men have done is excellent.

June 2024

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2517410,2518508#msg-2518508


November 2023

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2497497,2497576#msg-2497576

+1.0×10^10

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve read ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ and really liked it. I also read ‘An Indigenous People’s History of the United States’ which I also liked and recommend.

Local library doesn’t have ‘The Horse, the Wheel, and Language’ so I may just buy it.

TG

It sounds fascinating and I just bought it. Thank you!

For anyone who finds this topic interesting, new information is being published all the time.

The Anthony book is the best summary of the non-genetic, or pre-genetic, information. It explains the convergence of several technologies--nomadic pastoralism, the wheel, horse domestication and then riding, the mutation that created long-wooled sheep, rudimentary metallurgy, and a unique social organization--that enabled a tiny population of 10-20,000 people to spread across Eurasia and leave as its legacy languages spoken nearly half of all people alive today.

David Reich's genetics lab is finding largely the same story in DNA, which is fascinating because it shows how accurate the linguists really were. Both language and DNA are codes subject to random mutations at roughly predictable frequencies, which means you can use them to go back in time and find ancient commonalities. Remarkably, the DNA confirms about 90% of what the linguists surmised from words and grammar starting about 300 years ago.

The combination of archaeology--Anthony's analysis of horses, the wheel, wool, economics, and weapons--with the linguistics and now Reich's genetics produces a very fine-grained picture of prehistoric societies and history. And once one has a grasp of the story in Anthony's book, s/he can understand the burst of new analysis emanating from their shared lab at Harvard. Just do a search for "Reich" or "Anthony" and "Indo-Europeans" either via a search engine or Youtube and you'll find any number of fascinating articles and interviews--almost all of them free because the authors don't think people should have to pay for science.

For example,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLNRGGWpOmA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg77kPvDmqQ

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589597v1

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38659893/

They also have a paper coming out soon that will examine dog DNA as a means of tracking the evolution and spread of various canines, and their attendant humans, as they spread around the world.

ETA: Thanks again to kenc for the initial recommendation of David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here back in, I think, 2019.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2025 02:46PM by Lot's Wife.

Thank you!

Adding that book to my list.

I suspect your list is, like mine, quite long.

A few weeks ago I read an article that tells you how many books you will read in the rest of your life based on expected lifespan, present age, and reading habits. The resulting number renders mortality disturbingly tangible, especially since I've lost a couple of chapters by participating in this thread.

Tick tock, tick tock. . .

So many books, so little time.

I have several on audio that I listen to while doing practically everything.

I recently finished a book Beth had mentioned here.
RfM folks recommend the best stuff.

many thanks, haven't heard of this one. I found a PDF for it
https://archive.org/details/horsewheelandlanguage/page/3/mode/2up

Note that PIE devloped after the climate stabilized after the end of the last Ice Age, *before* the supposed Mormon and fundie EV Earth creation date of 4004 BCE.


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A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/science/indo-european-language-ancient-human-dna.html


Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

Many decades ago, linguists began trying to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language by looking at words shared by many different languages. That early vocabulary contained a lot of words about things like wheels and wagons, and few about farming. It looked like the kind of language that would have been spoken by nomadic herders who lived across the steppes of Asia thousands of years ago.

***

As the Indo-European debate advances, one thing is clear: Our understanding of its history now stands in stark contrast to the racist myths that once surrounded it. Nineteenth-century linguists called the original speakers of Indo-European Aryans, and some writers later pushed the notion that ancient Aryans were a superior race. The Nazis embraced the Aryan myths, using them to justify genocide.

But Dr. Reich said that studies on ancient DNA show just how bankrupt these Aryan stories were.

“There’s all sorts of mixtures and movements from places that these myths never imagined,” he said. “And it really teaches us that there’s really no such thing as purity.”

The Eurasian steppes make a more convincing case for the origin and transmission of technology than "Guns, Germs and Steel" ever did with its "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" tropes.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/07/2025 09:28AM by anybody.

We live in a society where there is nearly always more than one opinion. Or two for that matter.

Re draft animals, the Siberians domesticated some deer and used them to pull sleighs and carts. It's feasible that North Americans could have done the same. South Americans did manage to create some beasts of burden. Nothing one could ride though.

I don't think Jared Diamond's idea stands up well to scrutiny. Why for example do we find the relics of Nan Madol or Easter Island in remote locations with few resources, whereas similar locations with better resources e.g. the Solomon Islands or New Zealand don't have such things? Diamond's notions about east-west axis don't explain that. I can think of numerous other such examples.

The steppe theory is more convincing although it does overlap with Alexander Dugin's ideas and Turanism which are too ultranationalist for most people. (Including me by the way.)

> I don't think Jared Diamond's idea stands up well
> to scrutiny. Why for example do we find the relics
> of Nan Madol or Easter Island in remote locations
> with few resources, whereas similar locations with
> better resources e.g. the Solomon Islands or New
> Zealand don't have such things? Diamond's notions
> about east-west axis don't explain that. I can
> think of numerous other such examples.

And none of your examples contradict Diamond's thesis. The question the New Guinean chief asked him--you know, the conversation at the very beginning of the book--was why Europe and Asia were more successful than New Guinea. The answer was agriculture and pastoralism developed in the Fertile Crescent and spread to places with the right climates and animals.

His thesis is demonstrably correct. As Reich and others have shown, Diamond's surmise that the most valuable crops and animals came from Southeast Asia and were intentionally hybridized/selected there is genetically proven. So too is the notion that the vast majority of them spread from there through similar climates to the Atlantic and to the Pacific. The Indo-Europeans, for instance, developed their economy from sheep and cattle that were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent.

Diamond specifically states that rice (East Asia) and horses (Pontic Steppe) were exceptions to that rule. He also addressed the north-south axis in his chapters--did you actually read them?--on Europe and Northeast Asia. Did you read his other book on declining civilizations, with its extensive treatment of the Pacific islands including Easter Island?

I am not convinced you read Guns, Germs and Steel because what you are arguing against is not what he wrote but a caricature thereof, a straw man.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/07/2025 09:48PM by Lot's Wife.

Anonnnnnn Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The Eurasian steppes make a more convincing case
> for the origin and transmission of technology than
> "Guns, Germs and Steel" ever did with its "Post
> hoc ergo propter hoc" tropes.

That's a surprising suggestion, Anonnnnnn, given that Reich's analysis confirms and builds upon Diamond's. Put simply, Reich's genetics vindicates the development of agriculture and pastoralism and the human dispersal as described in Guns, Germs, and Steel.

In addition, Reich and his fellows have described many times why the Proto-Indo-Europeans could not have arisen any time or any place other than where they did because they required proximity to the civilizations Diamond elucidated. What the PIE peoples did was recombine the technologies of the Fertile Crescent and add a few new innovations of their own and then use the wealth generated by trade with the spectacularly rich peoples south of the Black and Caspian Seas to fuel their geographic expansion across the steppe.

Your argument is roughly the same as claiming that Steve Jobs is a better candidate for the origins of the personal computer than
Alan Turing. The proposition makes no sense because you couldn't have had Jobs's creations without Turing.

This steppe hypothesis isn't Reich's original idea in the slightest, nor Diamond's. It has formed the basis of Russian and Turkic nationalism (Turanism) for a long time. Alexander Dugin is highly influenced by such notions, and Putin via him, but Reich is presenting a cuddlier version for western audiences.

Diamond merely reinforces the modern prejudice that people exist as mindless blocs affected purely by external factors. In reality, one individual, or a religion can unite an obscure wilderness people such as the Arabs, Zulus or the Mongols and turn them into a formidable force overnight.

Alexander Dugin is a Eurasianist who wants to see Russia extend its power from East Central Europe to the Pacific and who has nothing to do with Indo-European studies. In fact, he can't have anything to do with that field because he claims a single origin for Turkic and Russian peoples, which fundamentally contradicts Indo-European reality.

Returning to the topic of this thread, what David Reich did was to use genetics to test, and in the process, vindicate the Indo-European hypothesis and to iron out a few wrinkles in what the linguists and archaeologists had achieved. He thereby forced such highly respected mavericks as Colin Renfrew to retract their erroneous versions of the story, which he gracefully di. Reich also identified through DNA the times and pathways through which the IE peoples spread around Eurasia and the world starting in 3300 BCE.

The notion that Reich produced a "cuddlier version" of Dugin's late 20th century thought is accordingly preposterous. Indeed, there's no reason to believe Reich has ever heard of Dugin.

Nor is your critique of Diamond accurate. Here you resort to your usual straw man technique. Diamond never said anything like "people exist as mindless blocs affected purely by external factors." What he said was that people of the same intelligence and character will have different futures based on their environments. To put the point starkly, three child geniuses marooned on a desert island will not get as much education and enjoy as high a living standard as three kids of average intelligence reared in upper-class conditions in NYC or Stockholm.

Diamond's point was thus the opposite of what you say: he explained to his New Guinean interlocutor that the failure of his insular country to produce the Industrial Revolution was NOT anything lacking in their minds or character but rather their unfortunate geographical location: in which there were no sheep, no cattle, no horses, no wheat, no millet, etc.

To deny the importance of one's environment in determining one's future is as silly as saying an ultra-nationalist Russian propagandist like Dugan has anything to say about the Sredni Stog and Yamnaya peoples of the fourth millennium BCE.

This is part of what Wikipedia has to say about Dugin, putting paid to the notion that he had anything to do with Indo-European studies or with Reich.

------------
In 1979, Aleksandr entered the Moscow Aviation Institute. He was expelled without a degree. . . Afterwards, he began working as a street cleaner. . .

In 1980, Dugin joined the "Yuzhinsky circle [ru]", an avant-garde dissident group which dabbled in Satanism, esoteric Nazism and other forms of the occult.[28] The Yuzhinsky circle gained a reputation for Satanism, for séances, a devotion to all things esoteric – mysticism, hypnotism, Ouija boards, Sufism, trances, pentagrams and so forth.[29][30] In the group, he was known for his embrace of Nazism which he attributes to a rebellion against his Soviet upbringing. . .[31]


------------
Reich has nothing in common with this bizarre street-cleaning mystic who believes Russians and Turks are the same race and culture.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/08/2025 05:02AM by Lot's Wife.

>Reich has nothing in common with this bizarre street-cleaning mystic who believes Russians and Turks are the same race and culture.

Whatever else is wrong with Dugin (and there is plenty), looking down on someone for working as a street cleaner is just pure class snobbery. That is irrelevant. It is completely irrelevant whether Dugin finished college or not, because he is highly influential in today's Russia and Putin openly admires him. Soviet colleges were somewhat doctrinaire... As indeed are many elsewhere.

I don't admire Dugin, I was merely pointing him out. He is one of a long line of people who has popularised such ideas within Russia. I am more interested in the steppe hypothesis and/or so called "nomad studies", which doesn't specifically refer to the PIE homeland but to the more general effects of outmigration from central Eurasia. I've been following the debates about PIE for decades now, and the whole thing is by no means "done and dusted".

> Whatever else is wrong with Dugin (and there is
> plenty), looking down on someone for working as a
> street cleaner is just pure class snobbery.

At first glance you are correct. Saying that a person's having little education and a bad job means his opinions should not be taken seriously is an example of the ad hominem fallacy.

But in this case that is untrue. Indo-European studies require advanced training in linguistic reconstruction, archaeology, and/or genetics. If someone lacks any such background, his views are unlikely to have any constructive value.

So prove me wrong. Show us any publications by Dugin in any scientific journal or book discussing the Proto-Indo-Europeans.


-----------------
> is irrelevant. It is completely irrelevant whether
> Dugin finished college or not, because he is
> highly influential in today's Russia and Putin
> openly admires him.

That's silly. The discussion in this thread is about prehistory in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Whether Dugin's position incontemporary racist and political circles in Russia is entirely irrelevant.


-------------------
> I've
> been following the debates about PIE for decades
> now,

Clearly not very closely. Above you confused Russian Turanism with PIE studies, which shows you lack even the most basic understanding of the latter.


------------------
> . . . and the whole thing is by no means "done and
> dusted".

Really? Then tell us what Reich, Anthony, Mallory, Gimbutas, or Renfew got wrong. All of them have acknowledged errors but I don't think you can adduce any.

and were never present in pre-Colombian America.

Bison, Big Horn sheep, Pronghorns, Tapirs, etc. are not able to be domesticated either.

Reindeer (by some circumpolar Inuit groups that may have crossed over the Arctic), Turkeys, Llamas, and Alpacas were semi-domesticated by some Indigenous tribes.

############

18 And also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man.

Ether 9:18, "Book of Mormon"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/12/2025 05:11PM by Maude.

"The Horse, The Wheel and Language"

Sounds like someone's been reading too much C.S. Lewis.

and also the initial question from the New Guinea chief from "Guns, Germs And Steel."

Answers to these questions help to disprove all of the ridiculous "Book Of Mormon" migration theories.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/13/2025 06:05PM by anybody.