the wheel, all of a sudden it was there +/- 3500 BC (or is this revised to 3000 BC ?)
and it spread immeadiately in Yamnaya, all over the steppe till Mongolia, in corded ware and even in Mesopotamia and central Europe
The wheel (and horses) enabled the true nomadic lifestyle that allowed animal herders to move constantly with their herds and all their belongings. It was very different from the nomadic way of hunter-gatherers, because H-G depended on the knowledge and richness of local environment, the seasonal migrations of wild animals, etc. With domestication and wagons, people suddenly became free of all constraints.
It may not be easy to imagine how it must have been when we look at today's world of states with borders, armies, law and police, but the world 5000 years ago was wide open for anyone who wanted to roam it. Neolithic villages were so thinly scattered that it was easy to circumvent them. It makes sense that nomadic Yamna people would have spread in all directions pretty much as far as they could. Moving south was more perilous because of diseases in warmer climes (esp. Africa) as Jared Diamond explained in Guns, Germs and Steel. But as long as they stayed roughly around the same latitude, the world is their oyster.
the horse, we don't know
were they just hunted? or herded? or domesticated? or ridden?
it is not clear for a long period of time
and it didn't spread in great numbers either, therefore - I guess - a domesticated horse was to expensive in maintenance costs
David Anthony uses bridles and mouthpieces as evidence of horse riding, and these come at least by 4000 BCE.
Why would domesticated horses be too expensive to maintain for steppe nomads ? Horses eat grass, which is plentiful in the steppe. That is their natural environment.
i'm not sure this ATP3 came on horse
he might have reached Iberia by boat too
same as you'd expect for Los Millares
I thought about it too, but there are many problems with coming to Iberia by boat.
1) In 3500 BCE galleys didn't exist yet, only smaller boats. So unless they followed the coasts all the way from the Black Sea to Spain, a journey surely as perilous as the Odyssey, it's highly improbable that they would have made it without any map or any knowledge of where they were going.
2) Add to this that small boats couldn't carry big animals like cows. If they were Steppe cattle herders, why would they suddenly leave their land bound lifestyle and migrate on boats to distant lands, without their animals ? What would they have eaten along the way ? Steppe nomads aren't fishermen and don't have knowledge of the sea.
3) We could imagine that ATP3 does not descend from Steppe nomads, but rather from some Near Eastern people. But if that is the case, the only region that would have such high frequency of Caucaso-Gedrosian (Northern Middle Eastern) in 3500 BCE would be around the Caucasus and Iran, not Anatolia and the Levant with their high EEF-like admixture + Southwest Asian and Red Sea admixtures, and certainly not Egypt. Then why would they have Mongoloid and Northeast European admixture (and mtDNA) if they came from the Middle East ?
4) El Portalon Cave is very deep inland. If they were sea travelers, why would they suddenly drop their boats and move across the Catalan mountains, the arid plains of Aragon and Castile and settle in a cave ? This is just too far fetched.
5) There is ample evidence that R1a/R1b Steppe nomads traveled quickly very long distances, to the Altai, Siberia and Mongolia to the east, and to Scandinavia to the north-west (for R1a) in just a few generations. Why would it be so hard to conceive that some early R1b nomads ended up in Iberia by the time other R1b nomads reached the Altai, even if it is 1000 years before the massive R1b invasion of Western Europe that would destroy Megalithic societies ? I suggested many years ago that the Bell Beaker culture was infiltrated progressively by small incursions of R1b people. That's what the red dots (= R1b) represent on my migration maps. It's just that these incursions may have started earlier than I thought, on a scale so small as to be undetectable by archaeological remains alone.
