Wrong horse? Wrong wheel? Wrong language?
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2018-11-08

The Kurgan theory, first formulated by Gordon Childe and revised by Marija Gimbutas, is enjoying a zombielike afterlife, bolstered by new ancient DNA results, which suggest that Europe was extensively repopulated by migrants from the Pontic Steppes, following the failure of the farming systems established in the Neolithic.
The most salient archaeological proponent of this case in recent years has been David Anthony, who has proposed a sweeping invasionist theory based on his discovery of a wheeled wagon in this region dating to the middle of the fourth millennium BCE. Anthony’s case for such Bronze Age horsemen conquering the world by virtue of this putative massive technological breakthrough is nevertheless spurious. Indeed, while it is only possible to observe the development of Indo-European languages to a time depth of some 1 to 4 millennia, representing only the latter third or half of the period over which, in Antony’s view, Indo-European languages spread over Eurasia and differentiated into highly diversified families, my own work suggests that Anthony is blithely assuming linguistic behaviour during the initial unobservable phase of this process which is diametrically opposed to the behaviour during the observable period. Furthermore, his linguistic archaeology of wheel words systematically ignores all comparative data from other language groups and as such, fails to address the likelihood that such words are nothing more than loanwords. The evident implication is that Indo-European is older.

Author: Mr Morris, Jonathan - ASLIP (Presenting author)