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OMightyMartian t1_jbblnoc wrote

It's an interesting way to use genetics to confirm what has been hinted by the linguistic evidence from Proto-Indo-European scholarship. In the Indo-European languages, some of the most conserved words across much of the language family have to do with horses and chariots, with cognates for horse, axle, wheel and related words to be found throughout the family. The Yamnaya are closely associated with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and the Pontic-Caspian Steppe is often viewed as one of the more probable locations for the Proto-Indo-European urheimat.

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wombat8756 t1_jbbuuzo wrote

Just want to point out that this particular study uses skeletal evidence, the genetic evidence supporting a domestic lineage of horses was previously known

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Bookbringer t1_jbeli88 wrote

Specifically, the researchers found 5 Yamnaya skeletons well-dated from 3000-2,500 BCE which display characteristics of "horsemanship syndrome" - ie, stresses and changes to the pelvis, thigh bone, hip socket which are seen in confirmed horseriders.

They aren't saying this is definitive proof of horseback riding. There's some speculation riding another animal (like a mule) or using the same muscles in a non-riding activity (barrel making, basket weaving) could cause similar characteristics.

But since it's already established that the Yamnaya people kept domesticated horses for milk at this point, it's possible.

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jeffersonairmattress t1_jbf99qy wrote

Ah, to live 4400 years ago when you could tell your idiot brother to “go milk a horse.”

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Birziaks t1_jbfmoos wrote

No need to for that, just go to central Asia. Kumis is still widely consumed

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FluphyBunny t1_jbx98a1 wrote

Yes this was missing from the context the previous time I read this. The two evidence together is very interesting.

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Jimbob929 t1_jbcyr0r wrote

Man, I wish I was smart enough to know what that means because it sounds cool

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OMightyMartian t1_jbd4w05 wrote

A cognate is a word in a language that is related to a word in another language. For instance, the word "night" is a cognate of the German "nacht" and more distantly of the French "nuit", itself descended from Latin "nux". The reconstructed Proto Indo European form is *nókʷts. Linguistics can treat words to some extent like evolutionary biologists treat genes, and if they understand the sound changes that happen in languages and their daughter languages they can come up with reconstructed forms of the ancestral word.

When linguists study a language family like Indo-European, they find some words are well preserved, taking sound changes into accounts. Words like horse, axle and wheel are among the most conserved words in the Indo-European languages, which has led to the hypothesis that before the Proto-Indo-European language began to break up, the Proto-Indo-Europeans had already domesticated horses and invented horse drawn chariots. Other linguistic evidence, such as conserved names for flora and fauna, give clues as to where these ancient people lived, and the Pontic-Caspian Steppe is a major candidate.

From there various groups spread, some south to Anatolia (the Hittites), Greece, others headed west (the Celts and Italic peoples), some north and are the likely ancestors of the Germanic peoples. Others went east and were the ancestors of the Indo-Iranian peoples. There were other groups that seemed to stay closer to home like the Balto-Slavic and Albanian peoples.

It's more complex than that, with influences from both related and unrelated languages (think about how many Romance words are in the English language, largely borrowings from Norman French).

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Birziaks t1_jbfr61x wrote

*nókʷts - naktis in lithuanian, or nakts in my local dialect. You can adress me as mister proto Indo-European from now on, thank you very much.

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PtahandSuns t1_jbd8c1o wrote

Wouldn’t it be the other way around though? In your example of night didn’t they have night before axles, so why did night change so much? Wouldn’t it make sense that one group came up with the technology traveled around and told people about it and not enough time has gone by to adapt those words into something by other groups yet?

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PaulJazof t1_jbdkkne wrote

In linguistic terms the word 'night' didn't change a lot between indo european languages.

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Tyg13 t1_jbdsv27 wrote

The Proto-Indo-European words for axle and horse are reconstructed as *h₂eḱs and *h₂éḱwos, so I'm not sure you can make a strong argument that *nókʷts (night) changed more than them.

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BabyJesusFTW t1_jbdcvlo wrote

Maybe because night is a period of time vs an animal? Night has many phases as well vs horse is horse?

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iLynux t1_jbdjtxs wrote

Night is so ubiquitous on Earth that it's no surprise there are thousands of different words for it across cultures and even within language families.

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Rocktopod t1_jbee6yx wrote

That's the opposite point to what the other comment was saying.

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iLynux t1_jbfoa18 wrote

What I meant was, everyone on Earth knew about night, and would've been using language to describe it, regardless of what people thousands of miles away call it. Horses were not everywhere on Earth, and so the first people to encounter and domesticate them kinda got dibs on what they were called.

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thewerdy t1_jbllrvw wrote

The change in the words isn't the important part - tracing the changes through time is how we arrive at the original PIE word. The important part is that the words were conserved throughout the daughter languages which indicates that the original PIE speakers had words for them and the were used enough and important enough to be passed down from the generations. A lot of really common words in IE languages can be traced back all the way to the hypothesized mother tongue simply because they are commonly used words. The fact that there are tons of preserved words relating to horses, chariots, and wagons tell us that the original PIE speakers likely used them a lot.

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StekenDeluxe t1_jbe7ps6 wrote

All of which strongly supports the idea of Proto-Indo-Europeans engaging in chariot-driving, but none of which supports the idea of Proto-Indo-Europeans riding on horseback.

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