wagon they were conceived, in a wagon they were born, and their hope in life
was to become wealthy enough to own several wagons, so that at their death they
could be sent to the Underworld with a wagon.
Some of the vehicles that the nomadic pastoralists used may have been two-
wheeled carts. Wagons carried more than carts, but in the fourth and third
millennia BCwagons did not yet have pivoting front axles and were therefore
difficult to turn. A two-wheeled cart, the wheels revolving on a fixed axle, could
turn with no difficulty at all. The animals that drew both carts and wagons were
of course oxen, usually castrated bulls. Teams of oxen in paired draft were
sometimes sacrificed and placed in the burial chamber of a kurgan along with the
funeral wagon.^79
The nomadic pastoralism that wheeled vehicles made possible must have spread
the language of the vehicles’ occupants through much of the Pontic-Caspian steppe
and well beyond. A great virtue of Anthony’s The Horse the Wheel and Language
is its detailed argument for a connection between wheeled vehicles and what seems
to have been a remarkable expansion of Indo-European languages in the third
millennium BC. By the end of that millennium almost everyone in the Yamna
archaeological culture, which extended over half a million square miles in the
grassland steppe and even into the forest steppe, may have been speaking a language
descended from PIE. During the third millennium BCthe Dnieper-Donets culture
of hunter-gatherers disappeared. We must suppose that the hunter-gatherers of
this and other Mesolithic cultures were converted either to mobile pastoralism
or to settlement on the river villages, and in either case they probably learned
the pastoralists’ language and forgot their own.^80 Over the vast territory from the
southern Urals to the Dnieper the evolution from PIE into several daughter
languages will have begun.
The expansion of PIE eastward from the Volga river in the third millennium
BCevidently led to the formation of various languages, including what by 1500BC
can be recognized as Indo-Iranian. Michael Witzel has proposed that the language
ancestral to Indo-Iranian was a lingua francaor a koinealong the steppe as far
to the east as the upper Yenisei river (the Yenisei languages, now almost extinct,
included some loan-words from a very early stage of Indo-Iranian).^81 Witzel also
suggested that the language ancestral to Indo-Iranian was carried south from
the steppe into the semi-desert and into the BMAC culture, where its speakers
borrowed words that would eventually appear in both Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan.
Still further to the east, the expansion of PIE apparently brought to the Tarim
basin the seeds of what eventually would evolve into the Tocharian language,
attested by Buddhist texts from the first millennium CE. Whether the earliest of
the famous mummies from the Tarim basin were related to the continuation of
such an eastward expansion is not certain, but James Mallory and Victor Mair
have cautiously concluded that they were.^82 DNA analyses tend to support that
conclusion.
As Proto-Indo-Iranian began to form east of the Volga in the third millennium
BC, at the same time Proto-Baltic apparently began to take shape west of the Volga
and eventually to have been brought into northeastern Europe.^83 In modern times
Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European 19