Militarism and the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe - Robert Drews

and morphology in the Baltic and Slavic languages, as well as in Italo-Keltic, finds
persuasive not only Anthony’s identification of the PIE speakers’ homeland in
Ukraine but also their reason for leaving it:

Population movements are determined by three factors. First, there must be

a reason to leave one’s homeland. This factor has rightly been stressed by

Anthony, who observes that people living along the boundary between the

poorer lowland steppe and the richer upland forest ‘risked periodic exposure

to severe stress, for small variations in precipitation, temperature, population

density or deforestation rate would dramatically alter the local distribution

of critical resources in these fragile borderland communities’ (1986, 292). This

periodic exposure to severe stress prompted expansion when the opportunity

presented itself.^18

A second factor is that the migrators must know of a land more desirable than the
one where they live. “Thirdly,” Kortlandt continues, “the cost of the journey must
not be prohibitive. It is now generally recognized that the domestication of the
horse played a crucial part in reducing the cost of physical mobility.”
Benjamin Fortson also finds Anthony’s scenario attractive. While acknow ledging
how controversial is Anthony’s conclusion that horses were ridden all through
the fourth millennium BC, Fortson cautiously accepts the conclusion and builds
upon it:

This has enormous consequences for the whole question of the IE homeland

and expansions. Anthony and his colleagues have emphasized that the

advantages lent by horseback riding are far more than just military, especially

for a people who had previously been confined to riverine forested regions

for their livelihood. Horseback riding would have allowed the population to

scout far and wide for new pastures, transport goods quickly, undertake

large-scale livestock breeding and herding, sustain a mobile and flexible

pastoral economy, and engage efficiently in long-distance trading (as well as

raiding and warfare).^19

Fortson assumes, reasonably enough, that PIE was widely spoken in the Yamna
culture, but then follows Anthony in proposing that ca. 3000 BCthe Indo-
Europeanizing of Europe began as Yamna riders pushed westward into central
Europe.^20 The entire scenario, Fortson admits,

hinges crucially on the date of the domestication of the horse, and of horseback

riding in particular. Both of these are hotly debated issues, although more

and more scholars agree that the horse was at least domesticated by the time

of the Yamna.^21

Although I have no doubt that the horse was domesticated by the time of the
Yamna culture, and probably 1000 years earlier, I am just as sure that in the fourth

32 The Kurgan theory and taming of horses