Musings on the neolithic and bronze ages

The Horse allows you to carry heavy objects such as Bronze. The Bronze forges start in the north caucasus in 3700 bc. Cattle are easily stolen. Ancient languages seldom spanned more than 100,000 km2.

Horse riding started between 4500 bc and 4200 bc

between 4200 and 3900 600 settlements were burned and abandoned on the lower Danube (Gulmenitca)

3960-3821 bc - bitter cold period

The cultures here abandoned their female figurines etc after this perion

If they were attacked by horsemen they would have had to go through coastline that was part of cucuteni trypolye culture. Why was the lower danube attacked first

By 4300 Old Europe produced far richer hoards than anywhere in the Middle East.

Now I haven't studied Sumer and Uruk enough - but it seems to me the quality of life - If History Begins in Sumer, the workers paradise begin in Old Europe

Tripolye B1 4300-4000 10% of settlements get fortification. Much higher production of arrow heads. Introduction of Steppe mace but no sign of cultural colllapse - some steppe pottery

Tripolye B1 had signs of absorbing lower danubians as there settlement activity went from 30 villages a year to 310 a year!

Western Indo European Languages have words for agriculture whereas Eastern IE do not, and Eastern also have a much more masculine pantheon.

Afansievo probably proto tocharian

First invasion of Danube - pre-celtic and pre-italic -

Followed by Proto Germanic

Sintashta Indo Iranian

5 Caspian Pontic Culturs of the eneolithic

The deities of the Rig Veda were almost entirely male.

In india the sapta matrika related to the pleiades and ursa major, were 7 goddesses who each married one of the 7 gods. The same in Greece. Were the Greek Goddesses adopted from non indo european sources?

"Our data further show that both migrations were followed by resurgences of the previous inhabitants: first, during the Middle Neolithic, when hunter-gatherer ancestry rose again after its Early Neolithic decline, and then between the Late Neolithic and the present, when farmer and hunter-gatherer ancestry rose after its Late Neolithic decline. This second resurgence must have started during the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age period itself, as the Bell Beaker and Unetice groups had reduced Yamnaya ancestry compared to the earlier Corded Ware, and comparable levels to that in some present-day Europeans (Fig. 3). Today, Yamnaya related ancestry is lower in southern Europe and higher in northern Europe. Further data are needed to determine whether the steppe ancestry arrived in southern Europe at the time of the Late Neolithic / Bronze Age, or is due to migrations in historical times from northern Europe25,26 . " https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/02/10/013433.full.pdf

The Role Of Women

"Yamnaya Social Organization The speakers of late Proto-Indo-European expressed thanks for sons, fat cattle, and swift horses to Sky Father, *dyew ptfer> a male god whose prominence probably reflected the importance of fathers and brothers in the herding units that composed the core of earthly social organization. The vocabulary for kin relations in Proto-Indo-European was that of a people who lived in a patrilineal, patrilocal social world, meaning that rights, possessions, and responsibilities were inherited only from the fa- ther (not the mother), and residence after marriage was with or near the husband's family. Kinship terms referring to grandfather, father, brother, and husband's brother survive in clearly corresponding roots in nearly all Indo-European languages, whereas those relating to wife and wife's family are few, uncertain, and variable. Kinship structure is only one aspect of social organization, but in tribal societies it was the glue that held social units together. We will see, however, that where the linguistic evidence suggests a homogeneous patri-centered Proto-Indo-European kinship system, the archaeological evidence of actual behavior is more variable. As Jim Mallory admitted years ago, we know very little about the social meanings of kurgan cemeteries, and kurgan cemeteries are all the archaeological evidence left to us over much of the Yamnaya world.37 We can presume that they were visible claims to territory, but we do not know the rules by which they were first established or who had the right to be buried there or how long they were used before they were abandoned. Archaeologists tend to write about them as static finished objects, but when they were first made they were dynamic, evolving monuments to specific people, clans, and events. Gender and the Meaning ofKurgan Burial We can be confident that kurgans were not used as family cemeteries. Mallory's review of 2,216 Yamnaya graves showed that the median Yamnaya kurgan contained fewer than 3 Yamnaya graves. About 25% contained just 1 grave. Children never were buried alone in the central or principal grave—that status was limited to adults. A count of kurgans per century in the well-studied and well-dated Samara River valley, in the middle Volga region, indicated that Yamnaya kurgans were built rarely, only one every five years or so even in regions with many Yamnaya cemeteries. So kurgans commemorated the deaths of special adults, not of everyone in the social Wagon Dwellers J2p group or even of everyone in the distinguished person's family. In the lower Volga, 80% of the Yamnaya graves contained males. E. Murphy and A- Khokhlov have confirmed that 80% of the sexable Yamnaya-Poltavka graves in the middle Volga region also contained males. In Ukraine, males predominated but not as strongly. In the steppes north of the North Caucasus, both in the eastern Manych steppes and in the western Kuban-Azov steppes, females and males appeared about equally in central graves and in kurgan graves generally. Mallory described the near-equal gender distribu- tion in 165 Yamnaya graves in the eastern Manych region, and Gei gave similar gender statistics for 400 Novotitorovskaya graves in the KubanAzov steppes. Even in the middle Volga region some kurgans have central graves containing adult females, as at Krasnosamarskoe IV. Males were not always given the central place under kurgans even in regions where they strongly tended to occupy the central grave, and in the steppes north of the North Caucasus (where Maikop influence was strongest before the Yamnaya period) males and females were buried equally.38 The male-centered funerals of the Volga-Ural region suggest a more male-centered eastern social variant within the Yamnaya horizon, an ar- chaeological parallel to the male-centered deities reconstructed for eastern Indo-European mythological traditions. But even on the Volga the people buried in central graves were not exclusively males. In the patrilocal, patrilineal society reconstructed by linguists for Proto-Indo-European speakers, all lineage heads would have been males. The appearance of adult females in one out offive kurgan graves, including central graves, suggests that gender was not the only factor that determined who was buried under a kurgan. Why were adult females buried in central graves under kurgans even on the Volga? Among later steppe societies women could occupy social positions normally assigned to men. About 20% ofScythian-Sarmatian "warrior graves" on the lower Don and lower Volga contained females dressed for battle as if they were men, a phenomenon that probably in- spired the Greek tales about the Amazons. It is at least interesting that the frequency of adult females in central graves under Yamnaya kurgans in the same region, but two thousand years earlier, was about the same. Perhaps the people of this region customarily assigned some women leadership roles that were traditionally male.3"

Basque and Georgian may be related