Horse, wagon &amp; chariot: Indo-European languages and archaeology

Anthony, David W.

doi:10.1017/s0003598x00081941

Cited by 49 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In addition to championing a multi‐disciplinary approach to the prehistory of eastern Central Asia, we have re‐examined the claims of Indo‐European origins of Tarim Basin peoples. Our comparative work has generally shown that the narrative espoused by Mallory and Mair (2000), Barber (1999), Anthony (1995) and others, i.e. that the famous mummies are the progeny of ‘proto‐Celtic’‘Europeans’ from the Pontic Steppe who migrated thousands of kilometres across two vast mountain ranges and the entire Eurasian Steppe just to settle on the outskirts of one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, is not the only interpretation for these data.…”

Section: Epiloguementioning

confidence: 66%

Genes, language, and culture: an example from the tarim basin

Thornton¹,

Schurr²

2004

Oxford J Archaeology

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The Tarim Basin 'mummies' of western China continue to fascinate scholars and the general public alike due to their 'Caucasoid' features, wellpreserved material culture, and putative 'European' origins. However, there have been some uncritical efforts to link these archaeological cultures to those of other ancient Eurasian groups (e.g. the Celts) by applying syllogistic reasoning to multi-disciplinary evidence. In an attempt to provide a more cautious synthesis of the prehistory of the Tarim Basin, this paper will briefly summarize the archaeological, physical, and linguistic evidence that has been used to model human settlement of this region. These data will then be related to recent molecular anthropology research on modern populations of Central Asia, focusing especially on the Uighur in relation to their neighbours. While the genetic history of the modern peoples of a particular region is not necessarily related to their prehistoric antecedents, it is argued that the Tarim Basin experienced a surprising cultural and biological continuity despite immigration from both east and west into Xinjiang Province. This conclusion has a number of possible political ramifications in the present day that must be addressed in future literature on the subject.

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Section: Epiloguementioning

confidence: 66%

Genes, language, and culture: an example from the tarim basin

Thornton¹,

Schurr²

2004

Oxford J Archaeology

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“…This may not be the case. Although there are claims for horse domestication as early as 4500 BC for Iberia and the Eurasian steppe, the earliest undisputed evidence are chariot burials dating to Ϸ2000 BC from Krivoe Ozero (SintashtaPetrovka culture) on the Ural steppe (36,37,38). Burial, textual, and͞or iconographic evidence shows that by 1250 BC, chariots were widespread from Greece to China (37,39,40).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mitochondrial DNA and the origins of the domestic horse

Jansen

Forster

Levine

et al. 2002

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

298

330

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The place and date of the domestication of the horse has long been a matter for debate among archaeologists. To determine whether horses were domesticated from one or several ancestral horse populations, we sequenced the mitochondrial D-loop for 318 horses from 25 oriental and European breeds, including American mustangs. Adding these sequences to previously published data, the total comes to 652, the largest currently available database. From these sequences, a phylogenetic network was constructed that showed that most of the 93 different mitochondrial (mt)DNA types grouped into 17 distinct phylogenetic clusters. Several of the clusters correspond to breeds and͞or geographic areas, notably cluster A2, which is specific to Przewalski's horses, cluster C1, which is distinctive for northern European ponies, and cluster D1, which is well represented in Iberian and northwest African breeds. A consideration of the horse mtDNA mutation rate together with the archaeological timeframe for domestication requires at least 77 successfully breeding mares recruited from the wild. The extensive genetic diversity of these 77 ancestral mares leads us to conclude that several distinct horse populations were involved in the domestication of the horse.

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“…But objections include that the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European lexicon has a strong bias toward domesticated animals rather than crops (81,82) and that reconstructed ProtoIndo-European words relating to wheels and wheeled vehicles suggest (some would say "prove") late Indo-European origins around the time of the invention of the wheel (ϳ4000 B.C.) (76). Even we two authors of this paper have differing views on this issue.…”

Section: Examples Of Specific Language Familiesmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…One hypothesis views Proto-Indo-European as having been spoken in the steppes north of the Black Sea by horse-riding nomadic pastoralists, whose supposed domestication of the horse and invention of the wheel around 4000 B.C. enabled them to expand militarily (74)(75)(76). But objections include that horse domestication and riding may not have begun until thousands of years later (77); that it is hard to understand ( perhaps even inconceivable) how steppe pastoralists could have imposed their language on so much of Europe west of the steppes (78); and that even linguists who reject glottochronology agree that Indo-European languages (including Anatolian) are so different from one another that their divergence probably began before 4000 B.C.…”

Section: Examples Of Specific Language Familiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions

Diamond

Bellwood

2003

Science

829

527

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The largest movements and replacements of human populations since the end of the Ice Ages resulted from the geographically uneven rise of food production around the world. The first farming societies thereby gained great advantages over hunter-gatherer societies. But most of those resulting shifts of populations and languages are complex, controversial, or both. We discuss the main complications and specific examples involving 15 language families. Further progress will depend on interdisciplinary research that combines archaeology, crop and livestock studies, physical anthropology, genetics, and linguistics.

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Horse, wagon & chariot: Indo-European languages and archaeology

Cited by 49 publications

References 17 publications

Genes, language, and culture: an example from the tarim basin

Genes, language, and culture: an example from the tarim basin

Mitochondrial DNA and the origins of the domestic horse

Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions

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