2 The Kurgan theory and the
taming of horses
For a long time most archaeologists and historians, including the present writer,^1
did not know when mounted combat began. In the nineteenth and early twentieth
century some historians assumed that even in deepest antiquity people had been
riding horses, and several Indo-Europeanists imagined that “the Aryans” of the
Battle Axe and Bell Beaker cultures were adept as mounted archers. In 1939 Hanns
Potratz, an equestrian and a Hittitologist, published a short article on the beginnings
of horsemanship.^2 Far from challenging the belief in Neolithic riders, Potratz
encouraged it, declaring that in the horse’s natural habitat riding began almost
immediately after domestication, and that a Neolithic rider was able to control his
mount merely with his voice, his knees, and perhaps a simple halter and neckstraps.
A few years earlier, and with great care, Gertrud Hermes had pointed out that
in Europe there was no evidence for riding or indeed for “tamed” horses during
the Neolithic period and the Early Bronze Age.^3 More generally, textual and
pictorial evidence suggested to some scholars that the riding of horses came
later than the driving of horses: it was fairly clear that in India, the Near East and
Greece horses were seldom ridden in the second millennium BC, while the driving
of chariot horses was frequent and widespread. The priority of driving over riding
in these lands was strongly supported by Josef Wiesner’s Fahren und Reiten in
Alteuropa und im alten Orient.^4
Gimbutas’ Kurgan theory
However certain Hermes and Wiesner were that horses were seldom ridden in
Neolithic or Bronze Age Europe and the Near East, neither of them excluded the
possibility that on the Eurasian steppe—the natural habitat of the wild horse—
good riding may have been common already in the third millennium BC. In the
second half of the twentieth century belief spread that on the steppe men were
routinely riding horses not only all through the second millennium BCbut already
in the third, the fourth, or even the fifth, and that through all that time they were
controlling their mounts well enough to engage in some kind of armed combat.
The belief was bolstered early in the 1960s by Dmitriy Telegin’s excavations of
a Neolithic village at Dereivka, on the right bank of the middle Dnieper. Telegin
found that the several dozen people in the village, which was carbon dated to ca.