A lot of people see the spread of the "yamnaya men" as a very important event and believe there's a greatness attached to the spread of the Indo-European languages (assuming that R1 carriers from Yamnaya did such a thing) and particularly, something special.
But actually, civilization is quite foreign to the homeland of the Indo-Europeans, even to this very day, Poland isn't the center of civilization, in fact there's evidence that was a less advanced place than their immediate neighbours to the West and South.
So it's unlikely that the Indo-Europeans were a civilization per se, they rather fit with the image of immigrants.
They came from a relatively unknown place, with a lot of good things I don't doubt it, but they WENT TO to another advanced CIVILIZATION.
They're immigrants turned conquerors.
To summarize, they remind me a lot to the Germanic/Barbarians, more than to the "conquering Romans" stereotype.
If you have been paying attention, scholars actually see them as migrants, rather than as the Wagnerian conquerors most consumers of this research believe they were.
My dear chap, at the time of the formation of Proto-Indo-European language and ethnicity, which is to say around 5000 to 6000 years ago (Pontic-Caspian Steppe cultures of Sredny Stog, Khvalynsk, Maykop and early Yamnaya), there were no civilised people (by modern standards) anywhere in the world. Agriculture had already spread to most of Eurasia and north Africa. These were very primitive Neolithic farmers, who also had pottery and in some places basic knowledge of early metallurgy (soft metals like copper, silver and gold), but that's about it.
At best there were the first faltering steps of civilisation in ancient Sumer and Egypt, but even there the difference with the rest of Eurasia was minimal. Sumer and Egypt are called the first civilisations because they had what archaeologist like to call "the first cities", but the truth is that these were more like towns of about 10,000 or 20,000 people - smaller in facts than the towns of the
Cucuteni-Trypillian culture (c. 5500 to 2750 BCE) in Moldova and Ukraine, which could exceed 45,000 people around 4000 to 3500 BCE.
In the case of early Egypt,
according to Tertius Chandler, Memphis had some 30,000 inhabitants and was by far the largest settlement worldwide from the time of its foundation (c. 3200 BCE) until approximately 2250 BCE.
But these Sumerians and Egyptians were not civilised by the modern understanding of the word. Around 3500 BCE they had no code of law, no mathematics, no science and no literature. Their proto-writing system was so basic it was used mostly for accounting (keeping records of stocks and sales). Literary works would come much later. The
Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known work of literature, dates from 2100 BCE to 1800 BCE, which is to say about 1500 years after the beginning of the Yamnaya culture, 2500 years after the onset of the Sredny Stog culture, and nearly 3000 years after the appearance of the Khvalynsk culture.
In fact the earliest form of writing did not appear in Egypt or Sumer, but in Romania (the
Tărtăria tablets) and northern Greece (the
Dispilio tablet) around 5300 BCE, which is to say about 2500 years before Sumer and Egypt.
So, no the Yamna people were not poor migrants who invaded "advanced civilisations". In fact they were one of the most technologically advanced people of their age. They had bronze metallurgy and swords before anyone else. They rode horses when no one else did. The West Yamna culture absorbed the Late Trypillian people, who had abandoned their large towns to adopt their neighbours' pastoralist life-style. Together they would move west across Europe and impose their own culture on the Neolithic/Chalcolithic tribes on most of the continent. They could do it because there were no civilisations in Europe back then, no cities, no organised governments, and most importantly because the Yamna people were more advanced (at least militarily with their bronze weapons and horses).
I have a feeling that in your head you associate the Yamna expansion with the Scythians of 3000 years later looting advanced Middle Eastern cities or fighting ancient Greeks and Romans. But that's not at all what the world looked like and how people lived at the time of the Yamna culture.
In Rome and in Northern Europe, there's a lot more people who are essential to Europe.
The ancient Romans (of any period from the Republic to the end of the Empire) are closer in time to us now than they were to the beginning of the Yamna culture (5500 years ago).
Furthermore, you have to understand that the ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts and Germanics are all (partial) descendants of the Yamna people. The descendants of Yamna tribes who migrated west brought Europe into the Bronze Age. Their languages replaced all those of earlier Europeans except the Basques (and ancient Gascons), the Uralics (Estonians, Finns, Saami...) and for a time the Sardinians (until they adopted Latin after being assimilated to Roman society). There would be no ancient European civilisation and no modern Europe without the PIE migrations - or at least nothing recognisable today.
