The Coming of the Greeksarguing that the domesticated horse appeared in the Ukraine
before it came to the Balkans, one scholar supposes that he is
confirming Gimbutas's theory that the PIE speakers came from
the Ukraine, 27 while another assumes that the Carpathian Bas-
in's priority over the Ukraine in the production of wheeled ve-
hicles points to the Basin as the probable homeland. 28 The con-
fusion is further confounded by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, who
suppose that in their Armenian homeland the PIE speakers were
hitching wheeled vehicles to draft horses as early as the fourth
millennium. 29
In the interest of clarification, let us recall a few points made
in Chapter Five. Throughout the immense area to which the
wild horse was native, the domesticated horse is attested in the
neolithic and chalcolithic periods. By the end of the third mil-
lennium, the domesticated horse was so common that in a
number of sites, from central Europe to central Asia, more than
half of the bones recovered by archaeologists were horse bones.
That the PIE speakers had a word for horse is of almost no sig-
nificance, since every people living in or near the horse's natu-
ral habitat must have had such a word. There is, in short, no
reason to believe that third-millennium PIE speakers were any
more dependent upon the horse as a food animal than were
roma Publishers, 1982), 18. Most recently, see Gimbutas, "Primary and
Secondary Homeland of the Indo-Europeans," 188: "the horse was intro-
duced to Europe by the Kurgan people in the second half of the jth millen-
nium B.C." Gimbutas's attribution of wheeled vehicles to these early Kur-
ganites has drawn criticism from Indo-Europeanists as well as
archaeologists. Edgar Polome, "Indo-European Culture, with Special At-
tention to Religion," in The Indo-Europeans in the Fourth and Third Millen-
nia, ed. Polome, 160, asks how it is possible to posit an Indo-European
migration into Europe ca. 4400 B.C. "if the cartwright's trade postdates the
first migrations by more than a millennium."
- Bokb'nyi acknowledges Gimbutas's encouragement in his intro-
duction to "Domesticated Horses." - Hausler, "Neue Belege," 675-76.
- Gamkredlidze and Ivanov, "The Ancient Near East and the
Indo-European Question," 12-13.