Much more puzzling than the butchering of riding horses is that an invention
of the bit ca. 4200 BCcould have been of so little consequence that no demon -
strable element of a bit appears anywhere in the archaeological record until
shortly before 2000 BC. Obviously useful inventions normally proliferated within
centuries rather than millennia. The first wheeled vehicles were produced in the
second half of the fourth millennium BC, and by the end of that millennium wheeled
vehicles are archeologically attested from Denmark to central Asia and the Persian
Gulf. The spoked wheel first appeared at the end of the third millennium BC, and
again we have evidence that light, spoke-wheeled carts were soon in vogue over
much of the steppe and the Near East. Stirrups appeared in China in the fourth
century CE and by the eighth were in use in western Europe.^39 If horses were
routinely and competently ridden in the steppe already in the fifth millennium BC
at least a few of them should eventually have been obtained by Near Eastern kings.
But until the end of the third millennium BCthe donkey or onager-donkey hybrid
remained the only equid of value and significance in all of the Near East.
The earliest demonstrable cheekpieces, and so the earliest demonstrable bit,
can now be dated—thanks to Anthony’s own initiative—to shortly before 2000BC.
It is hardly coincidental that at just that time a documented surge of interest in the
horse began. We know, that is, that the riding and especially the driving of hor -
ses has been continuous from the end of the third millennium BCto the present
day. Evolution of the bit was also continuous and relatively rapid. At its first demon -
strable appearance, ca. 2000 BC, the bit was primitive and was made entirely of
organic materials. By 1700 BCmetal bits were in use and by the fourteenth century
BCmany drivers used jointed snaffle bits made of bronze, not much different in
design from the standard bit in use all over the world today. In contrast, no evolution
of the bit had occurred in the millennia preceding 2000 BC. A comment by Philip
Kohl is pertinent:
Perhaps, horses were initially “domesticated” on the Ukrainian steppes in the
fifth millennium or in western Kazakhstan by the mid-fourth millennium BC,
but, if so, the effects of such horse domestication were not felt throughout
the greater Ancient Near East and Europe until much later.... Christopher
Columbus discovered America, not Leif Eriksson.^40According to Anthony the invention of the bit ca. 4200 BCdid have conse quen -
ces, and they were enormous. No connection between these consequences and the
invention of the bit, however, is demonstrable. In Anthony’s scenario the riders
in the steppe begin raiding flocks and herds, and the raids lead to social and eco -
nomic upheaval: the collapse ca. 4000 BCof what Gimbutas called “Old Europe”
(the numerous agricultural settlements in the lands along the lower Danube and
its tributaries), the creation ca. 3700 BCand the demise ca. 3400 BCof the super-
towns in the forest steppe between the Bug and the Dnieper, and ultimately the
Indo-Europeanizing of Anatolia, the Balkans, and the rest of Europe.
So far as the end of “Old Europe” is concerned, Anthony suggests that it was
the result of raids from the steppe by riders whose language was ancestral to Indo-
European:
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 37