Yamnaya culture

But what's interesting is that end of the Ice Age, agricultural revolution, and then you get two different urban revolutions, one in Mesopotamia and, and, and one in Ukraine.

And of course, the, the first major confrontation between people who settle and people who move takes place right then, um, between the Trypillia, who have lots and lots of towns, including some big ones, and the Yamna, who are coming from the east across those rivers, who are pastoralists.

And you're absolutely right.

Like, that, that moment of encounter between people who settle and people who move across the land is very important.

We are settled literate people, and so our propaganda is generally against the nomads, and we see them as being destructive and alien and backward and so on.

But historically speaking, the nomads very often brought things.

So in the case of the, the Yamna, there's a very strong example of this, maybe the strongest in the history of humanity, which is that they, they seem to have brought the, the Proto-Indo-European language, which then becomes the basis of the language that you and I are speaking now, also the basis of Ukrainian, the basis of languages that are spoken around half the world.

So yes, that, that moment of encounter is also very important, but there are also-- there are moments of encounter which are across the ocean, or sorry, across the Black Sea, like the Greeks meeting the Scythians, which is also very fruitful.

There are two major hypotheses.

There's the step hypothesis, which places the homeland somewhere on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and this is broadly associated with the expansion of steppe pastoralist societies, particularly the archaeological cultures collectively associated with the Yamnaya horizon.

According to this model, Indo-European languages spread westwards into Europe and eastwards and southwards towards Central and Southern Asia, as populations expanded and interacted with existing communities.

The main alternative is the Anatolian hypothesis, which places the homeland further south in Anatolia.

Again, perhaps the most familiar classical example is the Roman seizure of the Sabine women.

It's possible that the Yamnaya themselves began as the young warband of some clan or tribe, driven off to find a new home.

If so, they were reasonably successful, considering millions of modern people carry their genes and billions speak some version of their tongue.

Between 3300 and 3100 BC, two groups of Yamnaya headed off in opposite directions.

These weren't little forays or fact-finding ventures.

They were honest-to-deuce-potter major pilgrimages.

What we do know is that these departures gave birth to the earliest daughters of the Proto-Indo-European language.

And just a quick note for those in the know, the understanding of the Anatolian branch has recently changed in the face of genetics, so I'll cover the spread of those languages later this season.

These people were not simply an artistic group.

Genetic studies show that they brought a new source of ancestry, a Eurasian steppe gene flow associated with the Yamnaya herders from what is now Russia and Ukraine.

With these newcomers came advanced metallurgy.

They were among the first to smelt tin and create bronze tools and weapons.

I want to now get to these Indo-European speakers.

are the first ones what you call the Yamnaya.

And what was their cheat code? Was it that they had access to bronze and that was the petrol of their day, this geostrategic resource? Or was it that they had a certain technology, metallurgy, that allowed them to dominate and produce goods that others wanted? What was it that they invented?

Okay.

So the language that gave rise to all the living Indo-European languages, I'm going to call it Proto-Indo-European, and it's thought now the consensus amongst the historical linguists and the archaeologists and the geneticists is that it arose on the steppe north of the Black Sea or between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea around about 5,500 years ago, and that it was spoken by these people We define them by their archaeological culture, and that's an important distinction.

We call them Yamnaya, which is a Russian word, and it means pit grave, literally.

And they are defined by their burial rite.

And they had a very distinctive burial rite, at least at the beginning, where they would lay their dead on their back with their knees raised with some grave goods, very often under an urban mound, which in that part of the world is called a kirgan.

So eventually we domesticate these horses 3500 BCE and according to some anthropologists and archaeologists, we likely saved the horse from complete extinction across the planet by, you know, reining them in from domestication or from extinction with this domestication.

So the Yamnaya culture or in what we know as Indo-Europeans were the first and only people to domesticate the horse.

It's a single site origin domestication, we think.

Yeah, I found that really interesting that by domesticating the horse that human beings likely saved it from extinction.

There's new theories that it might have come out of Turkey.

the original, original, like proto-Indo-European, came out of Anatolia and then came north as a dialect into the Caspian and Pontic-Caspian step.

Or it originated itself in the Pontic-Caspian step with the Yamnaya culture or Indo-Europeans.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter because the extended spread of Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European was a direct repercussion of the domestication of the horse.