[HN Gopher] The origins and spread of domestic horses from the W...
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       The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian
       steppes
        
       Author : Hooke
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2021-10-26 22:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | optimalsolver wrote:
       | An interesting BBC documentary from the 90s about Indo-European
       | languages:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7x7vLM_q50
        
       | danans wrote:
       | > Our results also have important implications for mechanisms
       | underpinning two major language dispersals. The expansion of the
       | Indo-European language family from the Western Eurasia steppes
       | has traditionally been associated with mounted pastoralism, with
       | the CWC serving as a major stepping stone in Europe39,40,41.
       | However, while there is overwhelming lexical evidence for horse
       | domestication, horse-drawn chariots and derived mythologies in
       | the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, the
       | linguistic indications of horse-keeping practices at the deeper
       | Proto-Indo-European level are in fact ambiguous. The limited
       | presence of horses in CWC assemblages43 and the local genetic
       | makeup of CWC specimens reject scenarios in which horses were the
       | primary driving force behind the initial spread of Indo-European
       | languages in Europe44.
       | 
       | This is a pretty big shift in the story of how the IE languages
       | spread westward to Europe. It also would seem to firm up the
       | timing of the spread as happening sometime not too much later
       | than 4000BCE (when horses were domesticated) since the westward
       | spreading peoples had horses, but horse culture hadn't become as
       | central to their lives as it was with the eastern-migrating IE
       | speakers.
       | 
       | > By contrast, DOM2 dispersal in Asia during the early-to-mid
       | second millennium BC was concurrent with the spread of chariotry
       | and Indo-Iranian languages, whose earliest speakers are linked to
       | populations that directly preceded the Sintashta culture11,12,45.
       | We thus conclude that the new package of chariotry and improved
       | breed of horses, including chestnut coat colouration documented
       | both linguistically (Supplementary Discussion) and genetically
       | (Extended Data Fig. 8)
       | 
       | I can't see the Supplementary discussion, but the chestnut
       | coloration is likely referring in part to the Vedic (1500BC)
       | description of a red horse (arusa). There are also probably
       | contemporaneous Avestan terms.
       | 
       | It's pretty neat that the early mention of a chestnut/red colored
       | horse parallels the genetic distribution of that phenotype, if
       | I'm understanding the article correctly.
        
         | imbnwa wrote:
         | Interesting that the Eastern demographic developed horses more
         | so but it seems like they definitely still had spoken very
         | similar dialects since Sanskrit has insane overlap in lexicon
         | with modern Lithuanian
        
       | dr_dshiv wrote:
       | Hooke, I love your submissions and namesake. Did you see this
       | piece on how steppe raiding can lead to the evolution of larger
       | community sizes? Get along people, or die.
       | 
       | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0516-2
        
       | 1cvmask wrote:
       | These are valid conjectures till we find a new trove of evidence
       | to disprove the current accepted "scientific" anthropological
       | wisdom. I have witnessed enough orthodoxies to be overturn in my
       | lifetime that many just seem to be well documented theories or
       | conjectures.
        
         | inglor_cz wrote:
         | DNA is fairly hard data, though. Harder than ancient written
         | sources; on these timescales, it is preserved better than
         | texts, and it isn't written down by winners.
        
           | 1cvmask wrote:
           | I agree on that point. Just that the DNA was mobile. So we
           | might unearth new DNA based data that will rewrite this very
           | hypothesis is quite likely and put things on an even older
           | timescale.
        
           | Bayart wrote:
           | >and it isn't written down by winners
           | 
           | Is it not ? Y DNA patterns seem very much to correlate to <<
           | winners >>.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-27 23:01 UTC)