lpetrich
Contributor
Words for domestic animals and technologies may be good, and their presence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the presence of Indo-European speakers. Not sufficient because they can be present in the absence of speakers of IE languages. But their absence is good evidence of absence of IE speakers.
Looking at domestic animals, one finds "dog", "cow", "bull", "pig", "sheep", "goat", "horse", and "foal" (baby horse). A word for dog does not tell us much, since dogs are humanity's first domesticated animal. Most of the others were domesticated in the Middle East, and horses were domesticated in the steppe belt between eastern Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
They knew about a variety of wild animals: "wolf", "bear", "deer", "elk", "eagle", "mouse", "snake", and "trout/salmon".
Looking at technologies, one finds "wheel", "axle", "yoke", "wagon", meaning that the PIE speakers had wheeled vehicles. The word for wheel is derived from a word for rolling or turning, making it much like our word "roller".
One also finds words for wool, flax, spinning, and weaving, so they had woven clothing in addition to animal-skin clothing.
One also finds "metal" and "gold", with no evidence of "iron". Words for iron vary
So we must look for evidence of wheeled vehicles.
Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel | Live Science
A wheel in isolation is rather simple-looking, but a wheeled vehicle is not. The body of the vehicle has to have at least one axle, and the wheels have to fit onto the ends of the axles while being loose enough to rotate. The wheels themselves have to be close to circular with their axle holes in their centers.
The wheels, axles, and vehicle bodies were all made of wood, and their manufacture required metal tools. Stone tools are not precise enough. The first metal usable for tools is bronze, a copper-tin alloy. An early form of bronze was copper-arsenic, but it did not last long. Arsenic is well-known for its toxicity, and its users may eventually have decided that it is jinxed.
The first kind of wheel was likely a solid wheel, made from a slice of a log or from fastening some boards together. Spoked wheels were likely a later invention. The first wheel that we used may not have been a vehicle wheel but a potter's wheel, something easier to build.
So the image of a caveman carving a wheel is absolute bullshit. Never mind that most Paleolithic people did not live in caves, because there aren't many to live in. Instead, they made huts for themselves, something like what people with similar levels of technology were discovered doing by European and European-descended explorers. Most of these huts have not survived, but there are a few survivors: mammoth-bone huts in what's now European Russia.
We don't know for sure where and when the wheel was invented, but the first evidence of wheels is in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. So the invention likely spread quickly once it was made.
Horses and wheeled vehicles point to an identification of the place and time of the Proto-Indo-European homeland as that steppe zone about 5000 years ago - the Yamna or Yamnaya culture.
Looking at domestic animals, one finds "dog", "cow", "bull", "pig", "sheep", "goat", "horse", and "foal" (baby horse). A word for dog does not tell us much, since dogs are humanity's first domesticated animal. Most of the others were domesticated in the Middle East, and horses were domesticated in the steppe belt between eastern Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
They knew about a variety of wild animals: "wolf", "bear", "deer", "elk", "eagle", "mouse", "snake", and "trout/salmon".
Looking at technologies, one finds "wheel", "axle", "yoke", "wagon", meaning that the PIE speakers had wheeled vehicles. The word for wheel is derived from a word for rolling or turning, making it much like our word "roller".
One also finds words for wool, flax, spinning, and weaving, so they had woven clothing in addition to animal-skin clothing.
One also finds "metal" and "gold", with no evidence of "iron". Words for iron vary
So we must look for evidence of wheeled vehicles.
Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel | Live Science
A wheel in isolation is rather simple-looking, but a wheeled vehicle is not. The body of the vehicle has to have at least one axle, and the wheels have to fit onto the ends of the axles while being loose enough to rotate. The wheels themselves have to be close to circular with their axle holes in their centers.
The wheels, axles, and vehicle bodies were all made of wood, and their manufacture required metal tools. Stone tools are not precise enough. The first metal usable for tools is bronze, a copper-tin alloy. An early form of bronze was copper-arsenic, but it did not last long. Arsenic is well-known for its toxicity, and its users may eventually have decided that it is jinxed.
The first kind of wheel was likely a solid wheel, made from a slice of a log or from fastening some boards together. Spoked wheels were likely a later invention. The first wheel that we used may not have been a vehicle wheel but a potter's wheel, something easier to build.
So the image of a caveman carving a wheel is absolute bullshit. Never mind that most Paleolithic people did not live in caves, because there aren't many to live in. Instead, they made huts for themselves, something like what people with similar levels of technology were discovered doing by European and European-descended explorers. Most of these huts have not survived, but there are a few survivors: mammoth-bone huts in what's now European Russia.
We don't know for sure where and when the wheel was invented, but the first evidence of wheels is in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. So the invention likely spread quickly once it was made.
Horses and wheeled vehicles point to an identification of the place and time of the Proto-Indo-European homeland as that steppe zone about 5000 years ago - the Yamna or Yamnaya culture.
