5 ms·

The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

73 points by Hooke 5y ago

1cvmask 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    I think that history is always written by the winners is often quite wrong. While sometimes on culture replaces another. More often its not about that, its not like the whole literate culture simply goes away. Often we have text from both side. The Romans lost, and yet their text were preserved in the West. We know about the mongols from christian and muslin scholars. There are tons of example. Fallen empires leaving behind tablets and so on.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    >and it isn't written down by winners Is it not ? Y DNA patterns seem very much to correlate to « winners ».
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      I meant it is not falsified on purpose.
  - kiba 5y ago
    History is written by the literate, not the winners. For example, the Americans wrote a lot about the Vietnam war, which they lost.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      Nowadays, yes, because literacy is nigh universal. It wasn't prior to the Modern Age and scholars of the losing side tended to end up dead, imprisoned or exiled. (Interesting exceptions apply; such as the exodus of learned people from the collapsing Byzantine Empire.)
dr_dshiv 5y ago
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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0516-2
danans 5y ago
> 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 (aruṣa). 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 5y ago
  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
  - danans 5y ago
    > it seems like they definitely still had spoken very similar dialects Indeed, maybe even mutually intelligible, but we can never know for sure. > Sanskrit has insane overlap in lexicon with modern Lithuanian Not just lexicon but grammar also: they have very aligned case systems, for example. In the case of Lithuanian what you are seeing however is an extremely conservative language. Many ancient IE languages, not just Sanskrit, have a lot of overlap with Lithuanian.
optimalsolver 5y ago
An interesting BBC documentary from the 90s about Indo-European languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7x7vLM_q50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7x7vLM_q50
lovelearning 5y ago
Apart from the interesting subject, I'm very impressed by the data visualization. Appears to be R and something called GViz but may be experts here can confirm if it's right? The visualization is so good that I'm tempted to learn more about genetic data processing just to try out the viz!
teleforce 5y ago
Fun facts, in Arabic language there is a word 'Marhalah' for a maximum distance covered by a horse in one day that's approximately 45 km. In ancient time along the Silk Road there are guard houses that have this distance in between them and there will be at least a spare horse for seamless message delivery by the messengers. Once arriving at the next guard house, the message delivery does not need to stop and can be passed and relayed to the next messenger for fast messages delivery due to this arrangement. This robust messaging concept and mechanism is the pre-cursor to Pony Express, Post Office and the venerable SMTP protocol.

73 points by Hooke 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  I think that history is always written by the winners is often quite wrong. While sometimes on culture replaces another. More often its not about that, its not like the whole literate culture simply goes away. Often we have text from both side. The Romans lost, and yet their text were preserved in the West. We know about the mongols from christian and muslin scholars. There are tons of example. Fallen empires leaving behind tablets and so on.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  >and it isn't written down by winners Is it not ? Y DNA patterns seem very much to correlate to « winners ».
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I meant it is not falsified on purpose.
- kiba 5y ago
  History is written by the literate, not the winners. For example, the Americans wrote a lot about the Vietnam war, which they lost.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Nowadays, yes, because literacy is nigh universal. It wasn't prior to the Modern Age and scholars of the losing side tended to end up dead, imprisoned or exiled. (Interesting exceptions apply; such as the exodus of learned people from the collapsing Byzantine Empire.)

dr_dshiv 5y ago

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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0516-2

danans 5y ago

> 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 (aruṣa). 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 5y ago
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
- danans 5y ago
  > it seems like they definitely still had spoken very similar dialects Indeed, maybe even mutually intelligible, but we can never know for sure. > Sanskrit has insane overlap in lexicon with modern Lithuanian Not just lexicon but grammar also: they have very aligned case systems, for example. In the case of Lithuanian what you are seeing however is an extremely conservative language. Many ancient IE languages, not just Sanskrit, have a lot of overlap with Lithuanian.

optimalsolver 5y ago

An interesting BBC documentary from the 90s about Indo-European languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7x7vLM_q50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7x7vLM_q50

lovelearning 5y ago

Apart from the interesting subject, I'm very impressed by the data visualization. Appears to be R and something called GViz but may be experts here can confirm if it's right? The visualization is so good that I'm tempted to learn more about genetic data processing just to try out the viz!

teleforce 5y ago

Fun facts, in Arabic language there is a word 'Marhalah' for a maximum distance covered by a horse in one day that's approximately 45 km. In ancient time along the Silk Road there are guard houses that have this distance in between them and there will be at least a spare horse for seamless message delivery by the messengers. Once arriving at the next guard house, the message delivery does not need to stop and can be passed and relayed to the next messenger for fast messages delivery due to this arrangement. This robust messaging concept and mechanism is the pre-cursor to Pony Express, Post Office and the venerable SMTP protocol.