It is a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the journey to the Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses -- around 3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists say the discovery may revise thinking about the development of some preagricultural Eurasian societies and put an earlier date to their dispersal into Europe and elsewhere. These migrations are believed to have been associated with horse domestication and the spread of Indo-European languages....
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A new paper came out in Science this week, Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation, that's getting some media play. The second-to-last author is L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and the general combination of means and ends on display in The History and Geography of…
A few months ago I read Empires of the Silk Road, where the author makes the argument that contrary to the common perception of Inner Asians as uncouth barbarians who were inimical to civilization as we understand it, in fact these populations were critical to the emergence of particular civilized…
A western Eurasian male is found in 2000-year-old elite Xiongnu cemetery in Northeast Mongolia:
We analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), Y-chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (Y-SNP), and autosomal short tandem repeats (STR) of three skeletons found in a 2,000-year-old Xiongnu elite cemetery…
Note: The authors have a website which summarizes their research (via Language Log).
Speaking in tones? Blame it on your genes:
People who carry particular variants of two genes involved in brain development tend to speak nontonal languages such as English, while those with a different genetic…
I seem to recall from J. P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans that the Sredny Stog culture (c. 4,500-3,500 B.C.E.) showed some evidence of horse domestication, e.g. at Dereivka:
I also vaguely remember (in the same book) some ambiguous (and disputed) claims putting horse domestication back to 6000 BCE, although I can't call the details to mind at the moment.