Kurgan

At some point becomes the ancestral to Armenian.

But it looks like there's a shift towards pastoral societies, Kurgan burials.

But there's also some suggestion in the archaeology that those people were already there.

It's just that some kind of social shift happened and the pastoralists had more power after that.

They were mobility, they were wealth, and they were the very ability to continue one's journey in the afterlife.

Elite Kurgans could contain extraordinary numbers of sacrificed horses, sometimes buried with elaborate tack, masks, ornaments, and other decorations.

Archaeologists have opened these kirkens thousands of years later to find entire frozen worlds waiting inside.

Wood, leather, textiles, gold, food, weapons, bodies of horses, animals, humans, tattooed skin, and objects that ordinarily would have disappeared into the earth long ago.

from Vilani99.

About 5,000 years ago, what is now Western Ukraine was a frontier zone between two cultures, the most probable speakers of Proto-Indo-European hierarchical steppe herders and Kurgan builders who we know as the Yamnaya culture.

And entrepreneurs.

And egalitarian farmers that built what might have been the largest settlements on earth at the time, who we know as the Kukatenitrapelia culture.

We see versions of this across the Eurasian steppe.

Kurgan mounds that are now barely distinguishable from natural hills until you cut a cross-section.

burials under what look like ordinary pastures, graves that only stand out because of subtle changes in vegetation.

Now strip away the big stone markers some of those cultures used, and you have something that could vanish almost completely from the surface.