The Third Chimpanzee

Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Vintage
Books, London 1991. Later published as The Third Chimpanzee.

{p. 225} HORSES, HITTITES, AND HISTORY
More than 4,000 years before the recent expansion of Europeans over
all other continents, there was an earlier expansion within Europe and
western Asia that sired most of the languages spoken in that region
today. Although those earlier conquerors were illiterate, much of
their language and culture can be reconstructed from shared word roots
preserved in modern Indo-European languages. Their conquest of much of
Eurasia, like the subsequent overseas expansion of their descendants,
appears to have been an accident of biogeography. ...
Today, most European languages and many Asian languages as far east as
India are very similar to each other ... Only 140 of the modern
world's 5,000 tongues belong to this language family, but their
importance is far out of proportion to their numbers. Thanks to the
global expansion of Europeans since 1492 - especially of people from
England, Spain, Portugal, France, and Russia - nearly half the world's
present population of five billion now speaks an Indo-European
language as its native tongue.
To us it may seem perfectly natural, and in no need of further
explanation, that most European languages resemble each other. Not
until we go to parts of the world with great linguistic diversity do
we realise how weird is Europe's homogeneity, and how it cries out
for
{p. 226} explanation. ...
Of all the processes by which the modern world lost its earlier
linguistic diversity, the Indo-European expansion has been the most
important. Its first stage, which long ago carried Indo-European
languages over Europe and much of Asia, was followed by a second stage
that began in 1492 and carried them to all other continents (Chapter
Fourteen). When and where did the steamroller start, and what gave it
its power? Why was Europe not overrun instead by speakers of a
language related to, say, Finnish or Assyrian?
While the Indo-European problem is the most famous problem of
historical linguistics, it is a problem of archaeology and history as
well. In the case of those Europeans who carried out the second stage
of the Indo-European expansion beginning in 1492, we know not only
their
{p. 227} vocabulary and grammar but also the ports where they set out,
the dates of their sailings, the names of their leaders, and why they
succeeded in conquering (Chapter Fourteen). But the quest to
understand the first stage is a search for an elusive people whose
language and society lie veiled in the pre-literate past, even though
they became world conquerors and founded today's dominant
societies. ...
{p. 232} As of 500 BC, Latin was confined to a small area around Rome
and was only one of many languages spoken in Italy. The expansion of
Latin-speaking Romans eradicated all those other languages of Italy,
then eradicated entire branches of the Indo-European family elsewhere
in Europe, like the continental Celtic languages. These sister
branches were so thoroughly replaced by Latin that we know each of
them only by scattered words, names, and inscriptions. With the
subsequent overseas expansion of Spanish and Portuguese after 1492,
the language spoken initially by a few hundred thousand Romans
trampled hundreds of other languages out of existence, as it gave rise
to the Romance languages spoken by half a billion people today.
If the Indo-European language family as a whole constituted a similar
steamroller, we might expect to find its trampled debris in the form
of older non-Indo-European languages surviving here and there. The
sole such vestige surviving in Western Europe today is the Basque
language of Spain, without known relations to any other language in
the world. (The remaining non-Indo-European languages of modern Europe
- Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and possibly Lapp - are relatively
recent invaders of Europe from the east.) However, there were other
languages that were spoken in Europe until Roman times, and of which
enough words or inscriptions have been preserved to identify them as
non-Indo-European. The most extensively preserved of these vanished
tongues is the mysterious Etruscan language of northwest Italy, for
which we have a 281-line text written on a roll of linen that somehow
ended up in Egypt as wrapping for a mummy. All such vanished non-Indo-
European languages were part of the debris left from the Indo-European
expansion.
Still more linguistic debris was swept up into the surviving Indo-
European languages themselves. To understand how linguists can
recognise such debris, imagine that you, as a freshly arrived visitor
from outer space, were given one book each, written in English by an
Englishman, an American, and an Australian, about his or her country.
The language and most of the words in all three books would be the
same. But if you compared the American book with the one about
England, the American book would contain many place names that were
obviously foreign to the basic language of the books - names like
Massachusetts, Winnepesaukee, and Mississippi. The Australian book
would contain more place names equally foreign to the language but
{p. 233} unlike the American names - such as Woonarra, Goondiwindi,
and Murrumbidgee. You might guess that English immigrants coming to
America and Australia encountered natives who spoke different
languages, and from whom the immigrants picked up names for local
places and things. You would even be able to infer something about the
words and sounds of those unknown native languages. We actually know
the native American and Australian languages from which those
borrowings took place, and we can confirm that your indirect
inferences from the borrowed words alone would have been correct.
Linguists studying several Indo-European languages have similarly
detected words borrowed from vanished, apparently non-Indo-European
languages. For example, about one-sixth of Greek words whose
derivations can be traced appear to be non-Indo-European. These words
are just the sort that one might expect to have been borrowed by
invading Greeks from the natives they encountered: place names like
Corinth and Olympus, words for Greek crops like olive and vine, and
names of gods or heroes like Athene and Odysseus. These words may be
the linguistic legacy of Greece's pre-Indo-European population to the
Greek speakers who overran them.
Thus, at least four types of evidence indicate that Indo-European
languages are the products of an ancient steamroller. The evidence
includes the family-tree relationship of surviving Indo-European
languages; the much greater linguistic diversity of areas like New
Guinea, that have not been recently overrun; the non-Indo-European
languages that survived in Europe into Roman times or later; and the
non-Indo-European legacy in several Indo-European languages.
Given this evidence for an Indo-European mother tongue in the distant
past, can one reconstruct something of this tongue? At first, the
notion of learning how to write a vanished unwritten language seems
absurd. In fact, linguists have been able to reconstruct much of the
mother tongue by examining word roots shared among its daughter
languages. ...
{p. 235} By such methods, linguists have been able to reconstruct much
of the grammar and nearly 2,000 word roots of the mother tongue,
termed proto-Indo-European but usually abbreviated as PIE. That is not
to say that all words in modern Indo-European languages are descended
from PIE: most are not, because there have been so many new inventions
or borrowings (like the root 'sheep' replacing the old PIE root owis
in English). Our inherited PIE roots tend to be words for human
universals that people surely were already naming thousands of years
ago: words for
{p. 236} the numbers and human relationships (as in the table on page
226); words for body parts and functions; and ubiquitous objects or
concepts like 'sky', 'night', 'summer', and 'cold'. ...
The obvious next questions are: when was PIE spoken, where was it
spoken, and how was it able to overwhelm so many other languages?
Let's begin with the matter of 'when', another seemingly impossible
question. It is bad enough that we have to infer the words of an
unwritten language; how on earth do we determine when it was spoken?
We can at least start to narrow down the possibilities, by examining
the oldest written samples of Indo-European languages. For a long
time, the oldest samples that scholars could identify were Iranian
texts of around 1000-800 BC, and Sanskrit texts probably composed
around 1200-1000 BC but written down later. Texts of a Mesopotamian
kingdom called Mitanni, written in a non-Indo-European language but
containing some words obviously borrowed from a language related to
Sanskrit, push the proven existence of Sanskrit-like languages back to
nearly 1500 BC.
The next breakthrough was the late-nineteenth-century discovery of a
mass of ancient Egyptian diplomatic correspondence. Most of it was
written in a Semitic language, but two letters in an unknown language
remained a mystery until excavations in Turkey uncovered thousands of
tablets in the same tongue. The tablets proved to be the archives of a
kingdom that thrived between 1650 and 1200 BC and that we now refer to
by the biblical name 'Hittite'.
In 1917 scholars were astonished by the announcement that the Hittite
language proved on deciphering to belong to a previously unknown, very
distinctive and archaic, now-vanished branch of the Indo-European
family, termed Anatolian. Some obviously Hittite-like names mentioned
in earlier letters of Assyrian merchants at a trading post near the
Hittite capital's future site push the detective trail back to nearly
1900 BC. This remains our first direct evidence for the existence of
any Indo-European language.
Thus, as of 1917, two Indo-European branches - Anatolian and Indo
{p. 237} Iranian - had been shown to exist by around 1900 and 1500 BC,
respectively. A third early branch was established in 1952, when the
young British cryptographer, Michael Ventris, showed that the so-
called Linear B writing of Crete and Greece, which had resisted
deciphering since its discovery around 1900, was an early form of the
Greek language. Those Linear B tablets date to around 1300 BC. But
Hittite, Sanskrit, and early Greek are very different from each other,
certainly more so than are modern French and Spanish, which diverged
over a thousand years ago. That suggests that the Hittite, Sanskrit,
and Greek branches must have split off from PIE by 2500 BC or
earlier. ...
The usual conclusion from either glottochronology or pants' seats is
that PIE may have started to break up by 3000 BC, surely by 2500 BC,
and not before 5000 BC.
There is still another, completely independent approach to the dating
problem - the science termed linguistic palaeontology. Just as
palaeontologists try to discover what the past was like by looking for
relics buried in the ground, linguistic palaeontologists do it by
looking for relics buried in languages.
To understand how this works, recall that linguists have reconstructed
nearly 2,000 words of PIE vocabulary. It is not surprising that these
include words like 'brother' and 'sky', which must have existed and
been named since the dawn of human language. But PIE should not have
had a word for 'gun', since guns were not invented until about 1300
AD, long after PlE-speakers had already scattered to speak distinct
languages in Turkey and India. In fact, the word for 'gun' uses
different roots in different Indo-European languages: 'gun' in
English, fusil in French, ruzhyo in Russian, and so on. The reason is
obvious: different languages could not possibly have inherited the
same root for 'gun' from PIE, and they each had to invent or borrow
their own word when guns were invented.
{p. 238} The gun example suggests that we should take a series of
inventions whose dates we know, and see which of those do and which do
not have reconstructed names in PIE. Anything - like gun - that was
invented after PIE began to break up should not have a reconstructed
name. Anything like brother - that was invented or known before the
break-up might have a name. (It does not have to have a name, because
plenty of PIE words have surely become lost. We know the PIE words for
'eye' and 'eyebrow' but not 'eyelid', although PIE speakers must have
had eyelids. )
Perhaps the earliest major developments without PIE names are battle
chariots, which became widespread between 2000 and 1500 BC, and iron,
whose use became important between 1200 and 1000 BC. The lack of PIE
terms for these relatively late inventions does not surprise us, since
the distinctness of Hittite had already convinced us that PIE broke up
long before 2000 BC. Among earlier developments that do have PIE
names, there are words for 'sheep' and 'goat', first domesticated by
around 8000 BC; cattle (including separate words for cow, steer, and
ox), domesticated by 6400 BC; horses, domesticated by around 4000 BC,
and ploughs, invented around the time that horses were domesticated.
The latest datable invention with a PIE name is the wheel, invented
around 3300 BC.
Therefore, linguistic palaeontology, even in the absence of any other
evidence, would date the break-up of PIE as before 2000 BC but after
3300 BC. This conclusion agrees well with the one reached by
extrapolating the differences between Hittite, Greek, and Sanskrit
backwards in time. Hence if we wish to find traces of the first Indo-
Europeans, we should be safe concentrating on the archaeological
record between 2500 and 5000 BC, and perhaps slightly before 3000 BC.
Having reached fair agreement about the 'when' question, let's now
ask: where was PIE spoken? Linguists have disagreed about the PIE
homeland ever since they first began to appreciate its significance.
Almost every possible answer has been proposed, from the North Pole to
India, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores of Eurasia. As the
archaeologist J.P. Mallory puts it, the question is not, 'Where do
scholars locate the Indo-European homeland?', but 'Where do they put
it now?'
To understand why this problem has proved so difficult, let's first
try to solve it quickly by looking at a map (see page 228). As of
1492, most surviving Indo-European branches were virtually confined to
Western Europe, and only Indo-Iranian extended east of the Caspian
Sea. Western Europe would be the most parsimonious solution to the
search for the
{p. 239} PIE homeland, the solution that required the fewest people to
move long distances.
Unfortunately for that solution, in 1900 a 'new' but long-extinct Indo-
European language was discovered in a triply unlikely location.
Firstly, the language (Tocharian, as it is now known) turned up in a
secret chamber behind a wall in a Buddhist cave monastery. The chamber
contained a library of ancient documents in the strange language,
written around 600-800 AD by Buddhist missionaries and traders.
Secondly, the monastery lay in Chinese Turkestan, east of all extant
Indo-European speakers and about a thousand miles removed from the
nearest ones. Finally, Tocharian was not related to Indo-Iranian, the
geographically closest branch of Indo-European, but possibly instead
to branches used in Europe itself, thousands of miles to the west. It
is as if we suddenly discovered that the early medieval inhabitants of
Scotland spoke a language related to Chinese.
Obviously, the Tocharians did not reach Chinese Turkestan by
helicopter. They surely walked or rode there, and we have to assume
that central Asia formerly had many other Indo-European languages that
disappeared without the good fortune to be preserved by documents in
secret chambers. A modern linguistic map of Eurasia (see page 228)
makes obvious what must have happened to Tocharian and all those other
lost Indo-European languages of central Asia. That whole area today is
occupied by people speaking Turkic or Mongolian languages, descendants
of hordes that overran the area from the time of at least the Huns to
Genghis Khan. Scholars debate whether Genghis Khan's armies
slaughtered 2,400,000 or only 1,600,000 people when they captured
Harat, but scholars agree that such activities transformed the
linguistic map of Asia. In contrast, most Indo-European languages
known to have disappeared in Europe - like the Celtic languages Caesar
found spoken in Gaul - were replaced by other Indo-European languages.
The apparently European centre of gravity of Indo-European languages
as of 1492 was actually an artefact of recent linguistic holocausts in
Asia. If the PIE homeland really was centrally located in what became
the Indo-European realm by 600 AD, stretching from Ireland to Chinese
Turkestan, then that homeland would have been in the Russian steppes
north of the Caucasus, rather than in Western Europe.
Just as the languages themselves gave us some clues to the time of
PIE's break-up, so too they contain clues to the location of the PIE
homeland. One clue is that the language family to which Indo-European
has the clearest connections is Finno-Ugric, the family that includes
Finnish and other languages native to the forest zone of north Russia
(see map on page 228). Now it is true that the links between Finno-
Ugric and Indo-European languages are enormously weaker than those
between German
{p. 240} and English, which stem from the fact that the English
language was brought to England from northwest Germany only 1,500
years ago. The links are also much weaker than those between the
Germanic and Slavic language branches of Indo-European, which probably
diverged a few thousand years ago. Instead, the links suggest a much
older propinquity between the speakers of PIE and of proto-Finno-
Ugric. But since Finno-Ugric comes from the north Russian forests,
that suggests a PIE homeland in the Russian steppe south of the
forests. In contrast, if PIE had arisen much further south (say, in
Turkey), the closest affinities of Indo-European might have been with
the ancient Semitic languages of the Near East.
A second clue to the PIE homeland is the non-Indo-European vocabulary
swept up as debris into quite a few Indo-European languages. I
mentioned that this debris is especially noticeable in Greek, and it
is also conspicuous in Hittite, Irish, and Sanskrit. That suggests
that those areas used to be occupied by non-Indo-Europeans and were
later invaded by Indo-Europeans. If so, the PIE homeland was not
Ireland or India (which almost no one suggests today anyway), but it
also was not Greece or Turkey (which some scholars still do suggest).
Conversely, the modern Indo-European language still most similar to
PIE is Lithuanian. Our first preserved Lithuanian texts, from around
1500 AD, contain as high a fraction of PIE word roots as did Sanskrit
texts of nearly 3,000 years earlier. The conservatism of Lithuanian
suggests that it has been subject to few disturbing influences from
non-Indo-European languages and may have remained near the PIE
homeland. Formerly, Lithuanian and other Baltic languages were more
widely distributed in Russia, until Goths and Slavs pushed the Balts
back to their current shrunken domain of Lithuania and Latvia. Thus,
this reasoning too suggests a PIE homeland in Russia.
A third clue comes from the reconstructed PIE vocabulary. We already
saw how its inclusion of words for things familiar in 4000 BC, but not
for things unknown until 2000 BC, helps date the time when PIE was
spoken. Might it also pinpoint the place where PIE was spoken? PIE
includes a word for snow (snoighwos), suggesting a temperate rather
than tropical location and providing the root of our English word
'snow'. Of the many wild animals and plants with PIE names (like mus
meaning mouse), most are widespread in the temperate zone of Eurasia
and help to pin down the homeland's latitude but not its longitude.
To me, the strongest clue from the PIE vocabulary is what it lacked
rather than included - words for many crops. PIE speakers surely did
some farming, since they had words for plough and sickle, but only one
word for an unspecified grain has survived. In contrast, the
reconstructed proto-Bantu language of Africa, and the proto-
Austronesian language of
{p. 241} Southeast Asia, have many crop names. Proto-Austronesian was
spoken even longer ago than PIE, so that modern Austronesian languages
have had more time to lose those old names for crops than have the
modern Indo-European languages. Despite that, the modern Austronesian
languages still contain far more old names of crops. Hence PIE
speakers probably actually had few crops, and their descendants
borrowed or invented crop names as they moved to more agricultural
areas.
{p. 242} That conclusion presents us with a double puzzle. Firstly, by
3500 BC farming had become the dominant way of life in almost all of
Europe and much of Asia. That severely narrows down the possible
choices for the PIE homeland; it must have been an unusual area where
farming was not so dominant. Secondly, it begs the question why PIE
speakers were able to expand. A major cause of the Bantu and
Austronesian expansions was that the first speakers of those language
families were farmers, spreading into areas occupied by hunter-
gatherers whom they could outnumber or dominate. For PIE speakers to
have been rudimentary farmers invading a farming Europe turns
historical experience on its head. Thus, we cannot solve the 'where'
of Indo-European origins until we have come to grips with the hardest
question: why?
In Europe just before the age of writing, there were not one but two
economic revolutions so far-reaching in impact that they could have
caused a linguistic steamroller. The first was the arrival of farming
and herding, which originated in the Near East around 8000 BC, leapt
from Turkey to Greece around 6500 BC, and then spread north and west
to reach Britain and Scandinavia. Farming and herding permitted a
large increase in human population numbers over those previously
sustainable by hunting and gathering alone (Chapter Ten). Colin
Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge in
England, recently published a thought-provoking book arguing that
those farmers from Turkey were the PIE speakers who brought Indo-
European languages to Europe.
My first reaction to reading Renfrew's book was, 'Of course, he must
be right!' Farming had to produce a linguistic upheaval in Europe,
just as it did in Africa and Southeast Asia. This is especially likely
since, as geneticists have shown, those first farmers made the biggest
contribution to the genes of modern Europeans.
But - Renfrew's theory ignores or dismisses all the linguistic
evidence. Farmers reached Europe thousands of years before the
estimated arrival of PIE. The first farmers lacked, and PIE speakers
possessed, innovations
{p. 242} like ploughs, wheels, and domesticated horses. PIE is
strikingly deficient in words for the crops that defined the first
farmers. Hittite, the oldest known Indo-European language of Turkey,
is not the Indo-European language closest to pure PIE, as one might
expect from Renfrew's Turkey-based theory, but is instead the most
deviant language and the one least Indo-European in its vocabulary.
Renfrew's theory rests on nothing more than a syllogism: farming
probably caused a steamroller, the PIE steamroller requires a cause,
so farming is assumed to have been that cause. Everything else
suggests that farming instead brought to Europe the older languages
that PIE overran, like Etruscan and Basque.
Yet around 500... BC - at the right time for PIE origins - there was
a second economic revolution in Eurasia. This later revolution
coincided with the beginnings of metallurgy and involved a greatly
expanded use of domestic animals - not just for meat and hides, as
humans had been using wild animals for a million years, but for new
purposes that included milk, wool, pulling ploughs, pulling wheeled
vehicles, and riding. The revolution is richly reflected in the PIE
vocabulary, through words for 'yoke' and 'plough', 'milk' and
'butter', 'wool' and 'weave', and a host of words associated with
wheeled vehicles ('wheel', 'axle', 'shaft', 'harness', 'hub', and
'lynch-pin').
The economic significance of this revolution was to increase human
population and power far beyond the levels made possible by farming
and herding alone. For instance, through milk and its products one cow
gradually yielded many more calories than did its meat alone.
Ploughing allowed a farmer to plant much more acreage than he could
with a hoe or digging stick. Animal-drawn vehicles allowed people to
exploit far more land and still bring its produce to their village for
processing.
For some of these advances it is hard to say where they arose, because
they spread so quickly. For example, wheeled vehicles are unknown
before 3300 BC, but within a few centuries of that date they are
widely recorded throughout Europe and the Middle East. But there is
one crucial advance whose origin can be identified: the domestication
of horses. Just before their domestication, wild horses were absent
from the Mideast and southern Europe, rare in northern Europe, and
abundant only in the steppes of Russia eastwards. The first evidence
of horse domestication is for the Sredny Stog culture around 4000 BC,
in the steppes just north of the Black Sea, where archaeologist David
Anthony has identified wearmarks on horses' teeth that indicate use of
a bit for riding.
Throughout the world, wherever and whenever domestic horses have been
introduced, they have yielded enormous benefits for human societies
(Chapter Fourteen). For the first time in human evolution, people
could travel overland faster than their own legs could propel them.
Speed helped hunters run down their prey and helped herders
{p. 243} manage their sheep and cattle over large areas. Most
importantly, speed helped warriors to launch quick surprise raids on
distant enemies and to withdraw again before the enemies had time to
organise a counterattack. Throughout the world the horse
revolutionised warfare and enabled horse-owning peoples to terrorise
their neighbours. The stereotype that Americans hold of Great Plains
Indians as fearsome mounted warriors was actually created only
recently, within a few generations from 1660 to 1770. Since European
horses reached the US West in advance of Europeans themselves and
other European goods, we can be sure that the horse alone was what
transformed Plains Indian society.
Archaeological evidence makes clear that domestic horses had similarly
transformed human society on the Russian steppe much earlier, around
4000 BC. The steppe habitat of open grassland was hard for
{p. 244} people to exploit until they could use horses to solve the
problems of distance and transport. Human occupation of the Russian
steppe accelerated with horse domestication and then exploded with the
invention of ox-drawn wheeled vehicles around 3300 BC. The steppe
economy came to be based on the combination of sheep and cattle for
meat, milk, and wool, plus horses and wheeled vehicles for transport
and supplemented by a little farming.
There is no evidence for intensive agriculture and food storage at
those early steppe sites, in marked contrast to the abundant evidence
at other European and Mideast sites around the same time. Steppe
people lacked large permanent settlements and were evidently highly
mobile - again in contrast to the villages with rows of hundreds of
two storey houses in southeast Europe at the time. What the horsemen
lacked in architecture they made up for in military zeal, as attested
by their lavish tombs (for men only!), filled with enormous numbers of
daggers and other weapons, and sometimes even with wagons and horse
skeletons.
Thus, Russia's Dnieper River (see map on page 243) marked an abrupt
cultural boundary: to the east, the well-armed horsemen, to the west,
the rich farming villages with their granaries. That proximity of
wolves and sheep spelt T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Once the invention of the wheel
completed the horsemen’s economic package, their artefacts indicate a
very rapid spread for thousands of miles eastwards through the steppes
of central Asia (see map). From that movement, the ancestors of the
Tocharians may have arisen. The steppe peoples' spread westwards is
marked by the concentration of European farming villages nearest the
steppes into huge defensive settlements, then the collapse of those
societies, and the appearance of characteristic steppe graves in
Europe as far west as Hungary.
Of the innovations that drove the steppe peoples' steamroller, the
sole one for which they clearly get full credit is the domestication
of the horse. They might also have developed wheeled vehicles,
milking, and wool technology independently of the Mideast's
civilisations, but they borrowed sheep, cattle, metallurgy, and
probably the plough from the Mideast or Europe. Thus, there was no
single 'secret weapon' that alone explains the steppe expansion.
Instead, with horse domestication the steppe peoples became the first
to put together the economic and military package that came to
dominate the world for the next 5,000 years especially after they
added intensive agriculture upon invading southeastern-Europe. Hence
their success, like that of the second-stage European expansion that
began in 1492, was an accident of bio-geography. They happened to be
the peoples whose homeland combined abundant wild horses and open
steppe with proximity to Mideastern and European centres of
civilisation.
{p. 245} As archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, from the University of
California, Los Angeles, has argued, the Russian steppe peoples who
lived west of the Ural Mountains in the fourth millennium BC fit quite
well into our postulated picture of proto-Indo-Europeans. They lived
at the right time. Their culture included the important economic
elements reconstructed for PIE (like wheels and horses), and lacked
the elements lacking from PIE (like battle chariots and many crop
terms). They lived in the right place for PIE: the temperate zone,
south of Finno-Ugric peoples, near the later homeland of Lithuanians
and other Balts.
If the fit is so good, why does the steppe theory of Indo-European
origins remain so controversial? There would have been no controversy
if archaeologists had been able to demonstrate a rapid expansion of
steppe culture from southern Russia all the way to Ireland around 3000
BC. But that did not happen; direct evidence of the steppe invaders
themselves extends no further west than Hungary. Instead, around and
after 3000 BC, one finds a bewildering array of other cultures
developing in Europe and named for their artefacts (for instance, the
'Corded Ware and Battle-axe Culture'). Those emerging Western European
cultures combine steppe elements like horses and militarism with old
Western European elements, especially settled agriculture. Such facts
cause many archaeologists to discount the steppe hypothesis
altogether, and to see the emerging Western European cultures as local
developments.
However, there is an obvious reason why the steppe culture could not
spread intact to Ireland. The steppe itself reaches its western limit
in the plains of Hungary. That is where all subsequent steppe invaders
of Europe, such as the Mongols, stopped. To spread further, steppe
society had to adapt to the forested landscape of Western Europe - by
adopting intensive agriculture, or by taking over existing European
societies and hybridising with their peoples. Most of the genes of the
resulting hybrid societies may have been the genes of Old Europe.
If steppe people imposed PIE, their mother tongue, on southeastern
Europe as far as Hungary, then it was the resulting daughter Indo-
European culture, not the original steppe culture itself, that spread
to derived granddaughter cultures elsewhere in Europe. Archaeological
evidence of major cultural change suggests that such granddaughter
cultures may have arisen throughout Europe and east to India between
3000 and 1500 BC. Many non-Indo-European languages held out long
enough to be preserved in writing (like Etruscan), and Basque still
survives today. Thus, the Indo-European steamroller was not a single
wave, but a long chain of events that has taken 5,000 years to
unfold.
As an analogy, consider how Indo-European languages came to
{p. 246} dominate North and South America today. We have abundant
written records to prove that they stem from invasions of Indo-
European speakers from Europe. Those European immigrants did not
overrun the Americas in one step, and archaeologists do not find
remains of unmodified European culture throughout the sixteenth-
century New World. That culture was useless on the US frontier.
Instead, the colonists' culture was a highly modified or hybrid one
that combined Indo-European languages and much of European technology
(such as guns and iron) with American Indian crops and (especially in
Central and South America) Indian genes. Some areas of the New World
have taken many centuries for Indo-European language and economy to
master. The takeover did not reach the Arctic until this century. It
is reaching much of the Amazon only now, and the Andes of Peru and
Bolivia promise to remain Indian for a long time yet.
Suppose that some future archaeologist should dig in Brazil, after
written records have been destroyed and Indo-European languages have
disappeared from Europe. The archaeologist will find European
artefacts suddenly appearing on the coast of Brazil around 1530, but
penetrating the Amazon only very slowly thereafter. The people whom
the archaeologist finds living in the Brazilian Amazon will be a
genetic mishmash of American Indians, blacks, Europeans, and Japanese,
speaking Portuguese. The archaeologist will be unlikely to realise
that Portuguese was an intrusive language, contributed by invaders. to
a hybrid local society.
Even after the PIE expansion of the fourth millennium BC, new
interactions of horses, steppe peoples, and Indo-European languages
continued to shape Eurasian history. PIE horse technology was
primitive and probably involved little more than a rope-bit and
bareback rider. For thousands of years thereafter, the military value
of horses continued to improve with inventions ranging from metal bits
and horse-drawn battle chariots around 2000 BC to the horseshoes,
stirrups, and saddle of later cavalry. While most of these advances
did not originate in the steppes, steppe peoples were still the ones
who profited the most, because they always had more pasture and
therefore more horses. As horse technology evolved, Europe was invaded
by many more steppe peoples, among whom the Huns, Turks, and Mongols
are best known. These peoples carved out a succession of huge, short-
lived empires, stretching from the steppes to Eastern Europe. But
never again were steppe peoples able to impose their language on
Western Europe.
{p. 247} They enjoyed their biggest advantage at the outset, when PIE
bareback riders invaded a Europe entirely without domestic horses.
There was another difference between these later recorded invasions
and the earlier unrecorded PIE invasion. The later invaders were no
longer Indo-European speakers from the western steppes, but speakers
of Turkic and Mongol languages from the eastern steppes. Ironically,
horses were what enabled Turkish tribes from central Asia in the
Eleventh Century AD to invade the land of the first written Indo-
European language, Hittite. The most important innovation of the first
Indo-Europeans was thus turned against their descendants. Turks are
largely European in their genes, but non-Indo-European (Turkish) in
their language. Similarly, an invasion from the east in 896 AD left
modern Hungary largely European in its genes but Finno-Ugric in its
language. By illustrating how a small invading force of steppe
horsemen could impose their language on a European society, Turkey and
Hungary provide models of how the rest of Europe came to speak Indo-
European.
Eventually, steppe peoples in general, regardless of their language,
ceased to win in the face of Western Europe's advancing technology.
When the end came, it was swift. In 1241 AD the Mongols achieved the
largest steppe empire that ever existed, stretching from Hungary to
China. But after about 1500 AD the Indo-European-speaking Russians
began to encroach on the steppes from the west. It took only a few
more centuries of tsarist imperialism to conquer the steppe horsemen
who had terrorised Europe and China for over 5,000 years. Today the
steppes are divided between Russia and China, and only Mongolia
remains as a vestige of steppe independence.

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