I notice with satisfaction the critical comments from Wednesday, October 20, 2021 concerning the nomenclature used in an article in Nature. I have already in my discussions here at Llorc (and my two lectures in Bratislava) pointed to the fact that the Yamnaya expansion happened long before the invention of proper war chariots, and I also think I have mentioned that they probably got some kind of horses from the Botai tribe, but they didn't have saddles nor stirrups yet, and heaven knows what those early horses were worth, so it would be false to ascribe the success of the Yamnaya to the use of horsedrawn fast chariots - they simply didn't have them. Actually it still is a puzzle to me what exactly the Yamnaya had which made them so much stronger than their opponents in Europe. They may have brought the pest to Europe, but in a form that (according to the specialist in insect genetics) couldn't be transmitted by insects. The blogspot contains this interesting passage: "they [i.e. the modern domesticated horses] expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 bc, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots." And the Yamnaya are supposed to have spread already from around 2800 BC, so what gave them their obvious military advantage?
The world is indeed crazy!
PS: I just found something interesting about ther Hungarians in the
same blogspot, back from January 14 2020:
According to historical sources, ancient Hungarians were made up of seven allied tribes and the fragmented tribes that split off from the Khazars, and they arrived from the Eastern European steppes to conquer the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century AD. Differentiating between the tribes is not possible based on archaeology or history, because the Hungarian Conqueror artifacts show uniformity in attire, weaponry, and warcraft. (...)The presence of the N3a haplogroup is interesting because it rarely appears among modern Hungarians (unlike in other Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples) but was found in 37.5% of the Hungarian Conquerors. This suggests that a part of the ancient Hungarians was of Ugric descent and that a significant portion spoke Hungarian. We compared our results with public databases and discovered that the Hungarian Conquerors originated from three distant territories of the Eurasian steppes, where different ethnicities joined them: Lake Baikal-Altai Mountains (Huns/Turkic peoples), Western Siberia-Southern Urals (Finno-Ugric peoples), and the Black Sea-Northern Caucasus (Caucasian and Eastern European peoples). As such, the ancient Hungarians conquered their homeland as an alliance of tribes, and they were the genetic relatives of Asiatic Huns, Finno-Ugric peoples, Caucasian peoples, and Slavs from the Eastern European steppes.(end of quote). Arpad who lead these 'conqueror' tribes into presentday Hungary around 900 AC is reputed to have claimed that he descended from Attila the Hun himself. The Hungarian invasian happened fairly late, but the invasions by 1) the Huns under Attila and 2) a mix of tribes under Arpád are in many ways reminiscent of the invasions by the much older Steppe and Steppe-forest people. I have in another part of this quite interesting blogsport seen the theory that R1B (which became dominant in Western Europe) was indeed introduced by the Yamanya, but the R1A from Eastern Europe was introduced by a slightly more Northern group consisting of Steppe-Forest dwellers, and these people initiated the Late Neolithic Corded Ware culture that in some respects was similar to the Yamnaya culure (like patrilinear clans, single graves in mounds), but nevertheless quite distinct from it. This would also explain why the later Slavic invasion didn't really lead to major changes in the Y haplogroups in Eastern Europe - the Slavic invaders came to an area that already was stockfull of R1A genes.