The Sea of Azov, the Khvalynsk culture and the
Maikop culture
Although southern Caucasia may have some claim to have been the PIE homeland,
northern Caucasia and the steppe north along the Don and the Volga have a better
one.^54 This area in the fourth millennium BChad antecedents distant in both time
and place. Late in the seventh or early in the sixth millennium BCNeolithic colonists
seem to have made their way along the shore of the Black Sea, through the
Kerch Strait to the Sea of Azov and the rivers that flow into it: especially the
Kalmius, the Don and the Kuban. The land along the Kalmius and Don was
inhabited by foragers and hunters, who preyed especially upon the wild horses
that roamed the grassland steppe. The Mesolithic population is best known from
burials associated with the Dnieper-Donets culture. Although they did not produce
their own food, the hunter-gatherers did make pottery and usually decorated it
with a comb.^55
At some point in the seventh millennium BCthe first Neolithic settlements in
the area were planted, just to the west of the Don estuary on the Sea of Azov. The
Neolithic settlers, who must have come by sea, brought with them the four
domesticates familiar in western Anatolia and the Balkans: cattle, sheep, goats
and pigs.^56 Although it is not certain where the colonists came from, the available
evidence ties the Chalcolithic cultures of the northeastern Black Sea to the
settlements along the rivers that empty into the northwestern shore of the Black
Sea. According to Mariya Ivanova, the earliest settlements in northern Caucasia
were “a distant extension of the Copper Age culture of southeastern Europe.”^57
If that is correct, I would assume that the colonists from the east brought with
them an Indo-Hittite language.
The newcomers were apparently accepted by the locals, and for over three
millennia the Neolithic and the indigenous populations seem to have lived side-
by-side. Calibration of carbon dates indicates that several Neolithic cemeteries on
the lower Don and its estuary, the most important one at Mariupol, were in use
at least as early as 6000 BC.^58 From the Sea of Azov the Neolithic economy moved
up the Don and especially up the Volga, which at its Volgograd bend lies less
than 100 km east of the Don. Along the middle Volga the Khvalynsk archaeo -
logical culture began ca. 5000 BC, and it continued all through the fifth millennium
BC.^59 Many small cemeteries from this culture have been found, but most
information comes from a large cemetery (with more than 200 graves) excavated
at Khvalynsk, a city on the right bank of the middle Volga some 500 km upstream
from the Volgograd bend. For their meat the people in the Volga villages depended
on the usual domestic animals, but also on the horse, which was so well adapted
to the grassland steppe. Bones of cattle, sheep, goats and horses found in the graves
indicate that these animals were regularly sacrificed at funerals. The bones at
Khvalynsk are probably, as Anthony noted, the earliest evidence we have for horse
domestication.
By the middle of the fifth millennium BCChalcolithic settlers had also filtered
up the Kuban river into northern Caucasia.^60 Here the annual precipitation was
14 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European