The Sintashta horses!

The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes:

Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare1. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling…at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 BC3. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia5 and Anatolia6, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association7 between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 BC driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BC Sintashta culture.

The paper is open access. Basically the Sintashta seem to have triggered the equine revolution across Eurasia.

Onward on the steppe!


After a long delay, I’ve dropped part 4 of my continuing series on the Eurasian steppe and its history (I am currently planning on going down to the 13th century AD…so this should take me into 2022 since I’ve barely made it beyond 2000 BC as of now). The next installment is planned to be on the early Indo-Iranians and their connection to the Fatyanovo–Balanovo culture, and subsequent expansion in the Andronovo expansion (this will compliment my two pieces on India from last January).

The Emergence of Chariot driven Warrior Aristocracy of the Bronze Age

????? ?? ?? ????????? ??????????? ?? ??? ???????/??????? ??????? ???????, ????????? ?? ?????????+, ???? ??? ????????? ?? ????? ???????? ??? ??? ?????? ????? ?????????? ?? ????????? ?????????????? ?? ????? ????????? ? ? ???, ? ? ?????, ? ? ???????, ? ? ????, ? ? ????????? ??? ? ? ?????? ??????? ??? ?????????? ????? ???. ?? ??? ?????’? ???? ?? ???, ??? ?????? ???? ?? ? ????? ?? ?? ??. ?? ?? ????? ???? ???? ??? ????? ??? ? ??? ?? ??????????? ?? ??????? ???? ?? ????????? ??? ????????? ????????. ? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ??????????? ???? ??? ???????????, ?? ??? ????????????? ???????, ????? ??? ??? ?????? ??? ? ?? ????? ?? ????? ???? ????.

Continue reading The Emergence of Chariot driven Warrior Aristocracy of the Bronze Age

Lakshmi


I’m spending a lot of time reading about the Corded Ware for my series on the steppe. The Corded Ware is a culture that appeared that abruptly in Northern Europe between 2900 and 2800 BC, covering a vast territory of Central and Eastern Europe in a century. The name derives from the unique marks left on their pottery.

For decades scholars have argued whether they were an indigenous development out of the farmers who occupied this region for thousands of years, or whether there was a mass migration out of the steppe. More realistically, there was a synthetic position between at some point. Perhaps the farmers were influenced by a few elite bands migrating out of the steppe?

Today due to ancient DNA we know more. The Corded Ware culture in its mature phase is about 70% Yamnaya and 30% farmer. The farmer’s ancestry almost certainly comes exclusively through women. The Y chromosomes of the farmers were G2. There is very little of that within a few generations. It is almost all R1a.

But that leaves us with the question: where did the new pots come from? The answer is straightforward: the men from the steppe took wives from the farmers. They killed their fathers and brothers and took them to their homesteads to bear them children. These women knew how to make pots because they did not come from nomadic backgrounds. They adapted their techniques to making pots that exhibited marks that made them resemble the baskets that their husbands brought in their wagons.

The miracle of the immediate emergence of a new pottery technique is due to the fact that the nomads didn’t learn to work in clay. Their wives already had the skill.

Why is this posted on this weblog? That’s a question that does have an answer…

Multiple hearths of agriculture in ancient South Asia

Patrick Wyman’s Tides of History podcast is tackling South Asia and prehistory. He wrote up a Substack for it too, Ancient South Asia – Farming and People in India and Pakistan. I agree with Patrick here, though my confidence is low:

…It seems unlikely that a group living 1400 miles to the east would have chosen precisely the same suite of domesticated plants and animals as their related brethren in the Fertile Crescent. It’s intriguing that a fourth distinct group, as yet unsampled by geneticists, might have been living in the Fertile Crescent alongside their relatives 10,000 years ago or more. But the most likely, in my opinion, is that the group ancestral to later South Asians was living somewhere between the Indus Valley and the Zagros, perhaps on the Iranian Plateau: close enough to adopt some pieces of the Fertile Crescent farming package, close enough to head a short distance east, through the Bolan Pass, and into South Asia.

My confidence in this part is higher:

Yet they were not alone in South Asia, nor were they the only ones engaged in farming. Further to the east, along the Ganges River, the indigenous foragers were also experimenting with plant cultivation. In fact, there were no fewer than five places in South Asia where we see evidence of independent plant domestication. Mung bean, urd bean, horsegram, several varieties of millet, and rice were all cultivated extensively. These crops had the benefit of being able to grow during the summer monsoon season. South Asia was actually home to multiple Neolithics of its own.

In Southeast Asia and Europe, the hunter-gatherer populations contributed 20% or less to the ancestry of modern groups, who descend mostly from farmers and pastoralists. In South Asia the “Ancient Ancestral South Indian” (AASI) ancestry is ~50%. What’s the difference? I think the likelihood is that AASI populations were moving toward agriculture is a likely reason why they were much more demographically robust and impactful.

How the BJP Became the Bahujan Janata Party

Much of the ire of Indian elites and those left of the Indian political center simply boils down to one thing – the poor and lower-castes aren’t voting the way they want them to. Over decades, an assorted motley crew of political parties has taken the votes of India’s subalterns for granted. Through sops and social engineering, a steady support was built over the years. If you are of X caste, you must vote for Y party. And don’t ask why.

Yet, a party that venerates the idols of old has now become an iconoclast breaking the idea of voting one’s caste rather than casting one’s vote. The BJP, for years known as a “Brahmin-Baniya” party reserved for the privileged and so-called upper-castes, has shattered traditional caste calculus and come up with a new formula making established Indian political equations void. Today’s BJP is one that has been given a brute mandate by India’s Bahujans (the so-called lower-castes of India) along with its old upper-caste base. A united Hindu vote is beginning to coalesce, something that is sending shivers along the spines of the BJP’s political opponents.

But to truly understand the magnitude of these ramifications, we must peer into the past and understand the tradition of caste to grasp the revolution we are witnessing today.

Continue reading How the BJP Became the Bahujan Janata Party

To the victors go the glory!

I have written an introductory post (it’s free), Entering Steppelandia: pop. 7.7 billion, to a series of posts (mostly paid) that I will write about the Eurasian steppe. So I’m thinking and reading a lot about this topic. This is relevant to “Brown Pundits” because we subcontinental people have been stamped by the steppe.

First, there were the Indo-Aryans. About 15% of the ancestry of modern South Asians comes from these people (averaged across region and caste). Then there were the Iron Age Iranian pastoralists, Scythians, and assorted other related groups. There is no strong evidence right now of a major genetic impact, but I think the statistical power is not such that I can definitively ignore this possibility.

Finally, there are the Muslims. They had the least impact. But they are most reviled. Why?

They lost.  The lesson is to not lose. The rest is commentary.

The Mughals!


The Brown Pundits Clubhouse channel hosted a discussion on “the Mughals” yesterday that went on for a while. There seem to be two polarized extreme views

1) The Mughals were great Indians! Long live the Mughals.

2) The Mughals were genocidal colonizers and induced inter-generational trauma.

Most people occupy a position in the middle. As for myself, I think it is clear that the Mughals were to some extent an alien and occupying influence because that is how they viewed themselves more, or less. They were Turanian Muslims of Turco-Mongol provenance. No matter how much Rajput or Persian blood they had, their paternal lineage came down from the Turk Timur. The maternal lineage of Babur was Genghiside. If India had been mostly Islamicized this would have changed. But it wasn’t. Despite the deep cultural synthesis between Mughal culture and that of India and their indigenization of the generations, there remained a connection between ashraf Muslims and Persia and Central Asia. They were not equivalent to Muslim Bengali peasants or Ismaili traders in Gujurat.

And yet the flip side of this is that the Mughals, and Muslims as a whole, in particular Turks, drove change within Indian society. To some extent, the native reaction and response in the dialectical synthesis can only be understood in the light of the Islamic shock. More generally, an Islamicate civilization evolved that extended beyond the Mughals and included the Rajputs and Marathas (reciprocally, the Mughals internalized many Rajput values, but this is to be expected due to their long residence in India and intermarriage with Rajputs).

Those Hindus who are traumatized by the impact of Islam are free to feel this way, but I am genuinely curious about an Indian culture stripped away of Islamic influence. What would that look like? Perhaps Odisha and Sri Lanka might come close?

More generally, the excited and emotional response of both Hindus and Muslims and their inability to engage in epoché makes me think that the prospects for deeper analysis are poor. Emotion has reason by the leash.

Brown Pundits