Early Human History Rewritten
Review of The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David Anthony
This book, published in 2007, describes recent discoveries of archaeology and linguistics, as well as the new tools that researchers have at their disposal — their capabilities and limitations. And it put the new-found pieces together to form a coherent picture. For me, it was a revelation.
The story focuses on the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus, instead of the Near East or India. Many of the archaeological sites discussed are in Ukraine. Place names and rivers are now familiar from news of the Ukrainian War. That’s where horses were first domesticated and where chariots were invented. It is also the likely starting place of Indo-European languages. Previously little known, overlapping and interlinking cultures independent of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer, Akkad, and India became the basis of English and other languages now spoken in Europe.
Multiple vast migrations led to the spread of culture and language. These migrations were not based on military conquest, and they took place over the course of thousands of years. Often the migrations went from east to west, but sometimes people returned west to east.
I recently read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes claimed that there was no self-perception, no idea of the self before about 1200 BC, the time-frame he gives for the breakup of the “bicameral mind.” This discoveries described in this book totally debunk that theory. “The initial expansion of the Indo-European languages was the result of widespread cultural shifts in group self-perception. Language replacement always is accompanied by revised self-perceptions, a restructuring of the cultural classifications within which the self is defined and reproduced.” p. 340 The origins of Indo-European were in the millennium 4000–3000 BC.
