More Neolithic Y-DNA and mtDNA from Hungary, Germany and Spain (Lipson et al. 2017)

Danilenko and Shmaglii (1972) and Telegin (1973) have interpreted similar artifacts from Dereivka (Srednii Stog), and declared that the steppe horsebreeder warrior-riders had launched distant military raids.
Yes, this. Now it is believed that a large part of bones found in the Sredny Stog belong to the wild horse. It was an object of hunting.
 
I derailed this pretty bad, sorry. Anyway, I think we'll surely find L51 in West Yamnaya or in layers that gave rise to it such as Sredny Stog/Khvalynsk/Lower Mikhaylovka.

[/LIST]

Yes, I know about this dispute.
Yes, in the Sredny Stog was the cult of a horse. In the 1970th it was believed that there were riders. But then arheologists came to the conclusion that the horses there were for the most part wild. And the horse-headed scepters are not horse-headed and not scepters. These are probably mythical unicorns and a priestly instrument. (Klein 2007)
Probably there was originally a cult of a wild horse.

There's horse figurines all over the place going way back, so I'm not buying the unicorn thing. They go back to when they were predominantly hunters and fisherman in the region, so it certainly began with wild horses, but it evolved into something more as we see in historic Aryans who were riding horses. And of course now we know that historic Aryans/Iranians are directly descended from Yamnaya and latter steppe cultures. (Scythian Genomes). So the question is where it began.

Also, as far as I understand, there are not even any drawings of riders.
Therefore, I belong to the skeptics. The evidence base is currently weak and more speculative.

It's certainly open to debate. Whenever you're looking for the origin of something you're dealing with sparse evidence, so there will be skeptics, but now we have genetics.

I believe the first undisputed domestic horse in Europe proper is in Bell Beaker, and what I started off saying, before derailment, was that these BB male lines will be found in West Yamnaya or in layers that gave rise to it such as Sredny Stog/Khvalynsk/Lower Mikhaylovka. So all of this did circle back to my on-topic point.
 
Yes, this. Now it is believed that a large part of bones found in the Sredny Stog belong to the wild horse. It was an object of hunting.

I don't buy it.

It's most lilkely that these culture were in the process of domesticating horses because we see definite horse domestication for transport in Yamnaya just after this, and, Sredny Stog/Khvalynsk/Lower Mikhaylovka were definitely stock breeders of several other kinds of domestic animals including cattle, sheep, and pig, so these horses were almost certainly being herded, in which case they wouldn't exhibit the physical changes of horses that had already undergone generations of selective breeding for transport.

They probably herded horses for meat and milk very early on, similar to what we see with Reindeers among the Sami, and at some point realized they could ride them with Yamnaya being the point at which the training and the skill/technology reached a certain maturity. Considering what we see in Yamnaya, even if people doubt that we have actually found bridle components in earlier layers, it would be silly to propose that they didn't initiate and develop the technology leading to Yamnaya.
 
Yes, there are similarities like this, but here it is cultural borrowing and ritual-sacral context. Just as the CW before this borrowed this method of burial from the Balkan farmers, once.

CW
83c7e7c2cf37.jpg


BB
741d14dc54b5.jpg


Yamnaya
35851c6ec634.jpg

Dov, you need to clarify if it's casual typology or a real transmission (with other cultural proofs), otherwise I could make funny arguments as that Yamnayans came from France...:

https://rae.revues.org/259
 
I honestly couldn't find anything googling "Vinogradovka Kurgan".

By the way, wasn't Yamnaya mostly reliant on woolly sheep.

Yes, I see that it's only mentioned by Mallory. I'll see what I can dig up.

Of course, they were stock breeders and sheep would have played an important role, but if you look at the linguists the horse is a central figure. Being stockbreeder we're going to see all types of animal sacrifices, but the horse looks to be higher status owning to it being in the highest status graves, being more rare in general than sheep/cattle, and all of the horse figurines that are found all the way back to Samara/Dneiper Donets.

In the riches burials we see horse sacrifices, and in the language we see deep rooted myth and religion revolving around horses, the divine twins being the most commonly referred to example. Among the richest burials we see what might be something attributable to the divine twins with dual horses or horse skulls interred with Yamnaya remains along with two headed (doubled) horse figurines.

In the myths of most historic IE speakers there is a Divine twins myth involving two horses, or two horsemen, or some permutation in some cases involving drunkeness. This is in Greek, German, Hittite, Latin, and Indic, so it's surely a PIE thing. If you ask me, it sounds like the oral history of horse domestication. In some cases a member of the royal family mates with a horse that gives birth to the divine twins, which also have associations with what would be dual draft horses. How is this not the oral history of horse domestication for transport?

You can't just focus on one kind of evidence to draw these conclusions. Seriously everyone on this site has Asperger's and loses the forest in the trees. I'm not saying you, but it's common on here. It acts like blinders. Tunnel vision, if you will.
 
holderlin
The remains of the domesticated horses of Khvalynsk were discovered for the first time is a fact.
The presence of riders in the steppe cultures is not a fact.
But this does not abolish: migrations, domestication of horses, ravaging raids on neighbors (the Sredny Stog on a Tripolye) etc. I just do not see any problems in the presence or absence of riders. They were not, but, apparently, nothing has changed.

berun
Yes, this is a cultural conversion, as a corded ornament in BB.
 
The remains of the domesticated horses of Khvalynsk were discovered for the first time is a fact.
The presence of riders in the steppe cultures is not a fact.

The problem is that you can't really tell a domesticated horse from a wild horse only by their skeletal morphology. That's why zoologists are looking for premolar wear as an indicator of bit use. Four teeth have been retrieved from Botai sites that show the characteristic premolar degradation, however similar teeth can be found in Chalcolithic Jordan, as well as what appear to be mule skeletons dating to the Bronze Age.

The realisation that some of the bones from the Negev siteswere of horses (Grigson, 1991 and 1993) came as a completesurprise, no one would have expected them at such an earlydate in this area. It has even been suggested that they must beintrusive. However the presence of horse bones in all the siteswith large sample size—Gilat, Shiqmim and Grar, plus thosenewly recognized from the 1993 excavations at Shiqmim andin the smaller assemblage of Abu Matar, is incontrovertible.As we shall see horses of similar size are also present in someearly Bronze sites in the northern Negev.

Figure 3 compares the sizes of the equid bones from theNegev sites and Ghassul with those of the domestic donkeysfrom Maadi (Boessneck, von den Driesch and Ziegler,1989), the wild asses from Kom Ombo in Egypt (Churcher,1972) and the other sites noted above, and with the equidsfrom Shams-ed Dinn, almost all of which Uerpmann (1982and 1986) considered to be onagers. The graph shows a verywide range of variation for the sizes of bones from the Negevsites, and that many of the bones are much larger that thoseof donkeys or onagers; the only explanation is that they are ofhorses, or mules.As stated above the assumption that these Negev horseswere domestic, has been questioned by Wapnish (1997), Levine(1999) and Olsen (2006).

One of the equid teeth at Gilat, Fig. 3, tentatively identified as horse because of its great length, wasa lower second premolar. The crown was worn down past theinternal enamel patterns, the mesial face was so worn that itsloped distally and was polished all over. It is possible that thisis not merely the result of old age, but also of bit-wear, or ratherwear against a rope, signifying that the animal was under closehuman control (Grigson, 2006: 286, pl. 6.1b). The bevel on themesial face is much like that described by Anthony and Brown(1991; 2000), as indicating bit-wear. However Olsen (2006)has observed similar wear on a few of the second premolars ofhorses from the Pleistocene in North America.

http://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/paleo_0153-9345_2012_num_38_1_5468.pdf

The problem is that neither experimentation with crossing nor premolar wear are reliable indicators of domestication. As the author of the paper mentions, similar patterns of wear have also been found on wild horse skeletons in the Americas. So all we can say is that definitive evidence of horse domestication appears more or less simultaneously in Mesopotamia and Kazakhstan around 2000 B.C..
 
The remains of the domesticated horses of Khvalynsk were discovered for the first time is a fact.
The presence of riders in the steppe cultures is not a fact.
But this does not abolish: migrations, domestication of horses, ravaging raids on neighbors (the Sredny Stog on a Tripolye) etc. I just do not see any problems in the presence or absence of riders. They were not, but, apparently, nothing has changed.

Do you think the Khvalynsk culture or Sredny Stog were culturally and anthropologically connected to EHG as Kein said in the site you quoted?

Mesolithic roots of kinship
According to the real gradient turns out that the source of the genetic complex lies somewhere in the north. This is consistent with long observations L. L. Zaliznyaka of promoting Baltic Mesolithic and postmezoliticheskih cultures from the north to the south-east towards the steppes (Figure 7.), Which is traced by the archeological and anthropological materials (Zaliznyak 1980; 1984; 2016; Zaliznyak 1994; 2005). This agrees with the observation of long-standing archeology and anthropology of similarity kromanoidnogo massive physical type northern mesolit with yamnym anthropological type

karta-dlya-LSK_007_Rus.jpg
 
The problem is that you can't really tell a domesticated horse from a wild horse only by their skeletal morphology. That's why zoologists are looking for premolar wear as an indicator of bit use. Four teeth have been retrieved from Botai sites that show the characteristic premolar degradation, however similar teeth can be found in Chalcolithic Jordan, as well as what appear to be mule skeletons dating to the Bronze Age.
I already wrote that, the opinion in the Russian archaeologists opinion Botai is error. There it was about bits.

johen
Yes, I think they are related. Both culturally and genetically.
 
I believe the first domesticated horse as measured by skeletal morphology is Bell Beaker in Hungary, for reference.
 
Do you think the Khvalynsk culture or Sredny Stog were culturally and anthropologically connected to EHG as Kein said in the site you quoted?



karta-dlya-LSK_007_Rus.jpg

Samara HG, Khvalynsk, and Yamnaya Samara are successive layers in the same spot, and we have samples from all three.

EHG->EHG+more CHG->EHG+even more CHG

Mesolithic Steppe (pottery Neolithic)->Eneolithic Steppe->Early Bronze Age Steppe

All related with a clear increasing relation to Caucasians to the South, no doubt Maykop.
 
I believe the first domesticated horse as measured by skeletal morphology is Bell Beaker in Hungary, for reference.

Marsha Levine believes you really can't tell domesticated & wild apart at such an early date, especially not when we're talking about a single skeleton. Late Neolithic sites in Europe frequently yield horse bones, sometimes with significant variance:

We collected and evaluated, by the ‘logarithmic size index’ (LSI) method, all available postcranial equid bones found in the Czech Republic from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. Material from the Upper Paleolithic (Magdalenien) and Bohemian Late Bronze Age (Knovíz culture) was also included. Two different species of equids were documented: Equus hydruntinus Regalia, 1907 and Equus ferus Boddaert, 1785. The variation in the size of true horses was compared with data published for neighbouring countries. In most periods, the horses are found to be larger in the eastern part of Central Europe than in the western part.

The Czech lands appear to span the border of two worlds: the Pannonian plains and the western, geomorphologically diverse regions. The status of horses in the Neolithic Lengyel period from Moravia remains disputable. However, a high size variability in Eneolithic Funnel Beaker culture (TRB, 3800-3350 BC) together with a non-homogeneous distribution in Řivnáč culture (3100-2800 BC) and a significant increase in size between Lengyel and Baden-Řivnáč horizons (probably already in TRB) combined with the occasional occurrence of unexpectedly large individuals probably indicate the importation of tamed or even domesticated horses as early as the times of TRB culture, which is earlier than claimed in other recent studies, and possibly reflect multiple origins of the horse population. The large variability and repeated diminution in size of horses in the Early Bronze Age (Únětice culture, 2200-1700 BC) could indicate advanced domestication or multiple origins of the populations (or both). The persistence of wild horses in the Early Bronze Age cannot be proved osteometrically, but the presence of domesticated horses is considered certain.

http://sciencepress.mnhn.fr/sites/default/files/articles/pdf/az2016n1a2.pdf

However if you accept that these were domesticated, then so were the horses of Botai and the Chalcolithic Levant. I guess it comes down to what you want to believe.
 
I'm not unaccepting of the Botai evidence, although the historical record would rule out horse domestication in West Asia. Horses were clearly intrusive.

However if you accept that these were domesticated, then so were the horses of Botai and the Chalcolithic Levant. I guess it comes down to what you want to believe.

I would say rather that it comes down to why you would be more accepting of one theory vs another. I think I have plenty of reasons in this case.
 
It's too bad the supplemental info didn't list all the SNP calls. They gave a few in the descriptions relating to their determination, such as a few derived and a few ancestral. I'm looking to collecting I* and I1 data.

As for horses, it is ridiculous to me to even entertain the idea of a culture domesticating horses for thousands of years and NOT riding them. Heh.
 
There is some Y DNA updates done by Genetiker

https://genetiker.wordpress.com/2017/11/08/y-snp-calls-from-neolithic-europe/

Pretty big finds as the second E-L618 was found, its really starting to look like E-V13 was born in the Carpathian Basin also the J2a is J2a1-Z6055, it seems that J2a-Z6055 and J2a-Z6048 (Barcin) expanded differently than the rest of J2a. J2a-Z6055 has downclades found in South Asia was probably part of the farmer community than expanded to South Asia as well.
 

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