I received a suggestion to read Anthony's book "The horse, the wheel and language" as to understand the spread of IE languages from an archaeological point of view. I would like to share my astonishment as how such "theory" could have the general acceptance that receives as it doesn't stand much stronger than per example any Atlantis-Pyramids relation book... (which usualy I prefer to don't take into account).
The Usatovo culture appeared about 3300–3200 BCE in the steppes around the mouth of the Dniester River, a strategic corridor that reached northwest into southern Poland. The rainfall–farming zone in the Dniester valley had been densely occupied by Cucuteni–Tripolye communities for millennia, but they never established settlements in the steppes. Kurgans had overlooked the Dniester estuary in the steppes since the Suvorovo migration about 4000 BCE; these are assigned to various groups including Mikhailovka I and the Cernavoda I–III cultures. Usatovo represented the rapid evolution of a new level of social and political integration between lowland steppe and upland farming communities. The steppe element used Tripolye material culture but clearly declared its greater prestige, wealth, and military power. The upland farmers who lived on the border itself adopted the steppe custom of inhumation burial in a cemetery, but they did not erect kurgans or take weapons to their graves. This integrated culture appeared in the Dniester valley just after the abandonment of all the Tripolye C1 towns in the South Bug valley on one side and the final Cucuteni B2 towns in southern Romania on the other. The chaos caused by the dissolution of hundreds of Cucuteni–Tripolye farming communities probably convinced the Tripolye townspeople of the middle Dniester valley to accept the status of clients. Explicit patronage defined the Usatovo culture.
mixed culture, being moreover the supposed IE steppe herders a minority
Tripolye clients of the Usatovo chiefs could have been the agents through which the Usatovo language spread northward into central Europe. After a few generations of clientage, the people of the upper Dniester might have wanted to acquire their own clients.
If I had to hazard a guess I would say that this was how the Proto–Indo–European dialects that would ultimately form the root of Pre–Germanic first became established in central Europe: they spread up the Dniester from the Usatovo culture through a nested series of patrons and clients, and eventually were spoken in some of the late TRB communities between the Dniester and the Vistula. These late TRB communities later evolved into early Corded Ware communities, and it was the Corded Ware horizon (see below) that provided the medium through which the Pre–Germanic dialects spread over a wider area.
from a mixed culture it's supposed that their supposed IE language spread over Central Europe by cultural contact only; now we know by ancient DNA that there was a migration which was in the base of the Corded Ware Culture, so the Usatovo theory is simply a flaw, and even more, Yamnayists DON'T PROVIDE archaeological evidences linking the steppes with Central Europe, otherwise they wouldn't need to recall Usatovo...
The people whose dialects would separate to become the root speech communities for the northwestern Indo–European language branches (Pre–Germanic, Pre–Baltic, and Pre–Slavic) probably moved initially toward the northwest. That would mean moving through or into Late Tripolye territory if it happened between 3300 and 2600 BCE, the time span of the final, staggering C2 phase of the Tripolye culture, after which all Tripolye traditions disappeared entirely.
so a minoritary mixed culture supposedly speaking IE was traveling though non-IE territory to teach their language to their northerner clients without stablishing there.... wow
The widely separated pockets of Yamnaya settlement in the lower Danube valley and the Balkans established speakers of late Proto–Indo–European dialects in scattered islands where, if they remained isolated from one another, they could have differentiated over centuries into various Indo–European languages.
A fine but flawed explanation for Greek, Thracian, Illyrian... but no proof at all.
The many thousands of Yamnaya kurgans in eastern Hungary suggest a more continuous occupation of the landscape by a larger population of immigrants, one that could have acquired power and prestige partly just through its numerical weight. This regional group could have spawned both pre–Italic and pre–Celtic. Bell Beaker sites of the Csepel type around Budapest, west of the Yamnaya settlement region, are dated about 2800–2600 BCE. They could have been a bridge between Yamnaya on their east and Austria/Southern Germany to their west, through which Yamnaya dialects spread from Hungary into Austria and Bavaria, where they later developed into Proto–Celtic.31 Pre–Italic could have developed among the dialects that remained in Hungary, ultimately spreading into Italy through the Urnfield and Villanovan cultures.
so Celtic and Italic is supposed to have spread from a culture that was not related to Yamnaya... but learnt their language and spread it westwards... OMG!! (no archaeological evidence also). Instead, the area where proto-Celtic developed (the north Alpine arch) was peopled once by CW.
The Middle Dnieper and Fatyanovo migrations probably established the populations that spoke pre-Baltic dialects in the Upper Volga basin. Pre-Slavic probably developed between the middle Dnieper and upper Dniester among the populations that stayed behind.
Right, such cultures were CW branches sharing also the same R1a clade... but no cultural relation with the steppes is demonstrated again.
The Sintashta-Potapovka-Filatovka complex probably is the archaeological manifestation of the Indo-Iranian language group.
A Fatyonovo/Abashevo branch, both CW and Sintashta being R1a, as is usual among carriers of Baltic, Slavic, proto-Germanic, Iranian, Indian... and how Sintashta and Andronovo got their EEF genes other than by CW (Yamnayans were devoid of them)?
Near Nalchik, in the center of the North Caucasus piedmont, was a cemetery containing 147 graves with contracted skeletons lying on their sides in red ochre—stained pits in groups of two or three under stone cairns. Females lay in a contracted pose on the left side and males on their right.30 A few copper ornaments, beads made of deer and cattle teeth, and polished stone bracelets (like those found in grave 108 at Khvalynsk and at Krivoluchie) accompanied them. One grave yielded a date on human bone of 5000–4800 BCE (possibly too old by a hundred to five hundred years, if the dated sample was contaminated by old carbon in fish). Five graves in the same region at Staronizhesteblievsk were provided with boars-tusk plaques of the DDII Mariupol type, animal-tooth beads, and flint blades that seem at home in the Early Eneolithic.31 An undated cave occupation in the Kuban valley at Kamennomost Cave, level 2, which could be of the same date, has yielded sheep/goat and cattle bones stratified beneath a later level with Maikop-culture materials. Carved stone bracelets and ornamental stones from the Caucasus—black jet, rock crystal, and porphyry—were traded into Khvalynsk and Dnieper-Donets II sites, perhaps from people like those at Nal’chik and Kamennomost Cave 2. The Nalchik-era sites clearly represent a community that had at least a few domesticated cattle and sheep/goats, and was in contact with Khvalynsk. They probably got their domesticated animals from the Dnieper, as the Khvalynsk people did.
so kurgans two thousand years before Yamnaya? is that the Nalchik provided culture and herds to Samara? also the R1b DNA? were Caucasian colonizers? that explains the Nelithic-Iran DNA there?
Wagons probably appeared in the steppes between about 3500 and 3300 BCE, possibly from the west through Europe, or possibly through the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture, from Mesopotamia. .... Again, contact with people from the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture, such as the makers of the kurgan at Evdik on the lower Volga, might have stimulated the change from late Khvalynsk to early Yamnaya. One of the stimuli introduced from the North Caucasus might have been wagons and wagon-making skills.
The A1 or Repin style was made earliest in the middle Don–middle Volga region. Repin pottery is stratified beneath Yamnaya pottery at Cherkassky on the middle Don and is dated between 3950 and 3600 BCE at an antelope hunters’ camp on the lower Volga at Kyzyl-Khak. The earliest Repin pottery was somewhat similar in form and decoration to the late Sredni Stog–Konstantinovka types on the lower Don, and it is now thought that contact with the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture on the lower Don at places like Konstantinovka stimulated the emergence and spread of the early Repin culture and, through Repin, early Yamnaya. The metal-tanged daggers and sleeved axes of the early Yamnaya horizon certainly were copied after Maikop-Novosvobodnaya types.
Yamnaya is debt to Caucasian wagons, daggers, kurgans, herds, DNA...
So we have Caucasian DNA and culture in Yamnaya, but no Yamnaya culture in Corded Ware, but Caucasian DNA in Corded Ware; then the Caucasians might have reached northerner areas.
