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4500-2500 BC Kurgan

Many ancient Bronze Age barrow-like tomb mounds of larch logs covered over by large cairns of boulders and stones have been found. In Russian, such "barrows" are called kurgansa word of Turkic origin and the spectacular Scythian burials at Pazyryk introduced "kurgan" into general usage to describe such log-barrow burials. Kurgan is one of the oldest cities in Siberia. Situated in the valley of the Tobol River, Kurgan is a southwest Siberian rail junction on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The city manufactures grain elevators, flour milling equipment, buses, chemical equipment, food products, and farm and road building machinery; it also has meat packing plants.

The Yamna ("Kurgan") people were nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse and who have been claimed to have spread Indo-European languages to Europe. While some linguists agree that proto-Indo-European (PIE) may have originated either in Anatolia or in Transcaucasia, more linguists accept the "Kurgan" (meaning barrow in Russian) theory by Gimbutas, which views the original speakers of PIE as moving sometime between 4300 and 2800 BC (calibrated years) from the southern steppes of Ukraine (between the Black and the Caspian Seas where the Kurgan culture has been first documented) and spreading to the extreme west and north of Europe.

Recent findings have added important elements to this picture. On their basis, Anthony identifies the PIE homeland in a region of the order of 500,000 km2 in eastern Europe north of the Black and Caspian Seas and gives 3300 B.C. (calibrated) as the date after which dispersal and language differentiation began. At the Bronze and Iron Ages, south Siberia was a region of overwhelmingly predominant European settlement, suggesting an eastward migration of Kurgan people across the Russo-Kazakh steppe. At the Bronze and Iron Age timeframe, south Siberians were blue (or green)-eyed, fair-skinned and light-haired people.

The linguistic argument for a PIE origin in the southern steppes is based mainly on the contact between PIE and Ugro-Finnic and PIE and Kartvelian. The archaeological argument is the clear presence of wheeled vehicles in the PIE homeland. The main Kurgan culture involved in this expansion (Yamna) spread later into the lower Danube and the Carpathian Basin. This, and the Corded Ware culture in parts of northern Europe, might have provided a medium through which IE languages diffused to the rest of Europe. Horseback riding and the important socioeconomic changes involved in a rapid long-distance way of moving might have also provided a mechanism of diffusion of the IE speakers out of Ukraine.

Other related Kurgan cultures are responsible for the spread of IE languages to Iran and India. The search for Indo-Iranian origins east of the Urals has in the Andronovo culture of Central Asia a good candidate.

Europe is partitioned into two linguistic areas, (i) IE and (ii) Uralic, spoken almost exclusively in the north by Lapps in northern Scandinavia, Finns, Estonians, and several populations in northern Russia and in a southern isolated pocket inhabited by Hungarians who owe their Uralic language to the invasion by Magyars in the ninth and tenth centuries AD. One plausible hypothesis is that people speaking Uralic languages spread westward along the Arctic coast from an unknown area of origin in northern Siberia. Note, by way of analogy, that other Arctic populations (e.g., Eskimos) have always remained at low density and spread mostly or only along the coast. Today Uralic-speaking Samoyeds, possibly the population ancestral to Lapps (Saame), live not far from the Arctic Ocean east of the Urals. Most archaeologists since midcentury have reacted strongly to the earlier trend of considering local change of artifacts as signs of migratory movements of large groups of people. Thus, the hypothesis of the migration of farmers was not accepted by some.

A feminist golden age before the onset of patriarchy was a time when women ruled the earth, and all the world worshipped the Goddess. According to the myth of matriarchal prehistory, there was a time in social development before written records when women were the central controlling forces in community life. Goddesses were the primary objects of worship, and peace reigned between the sexes. The pioneering archeologist Marija Gimbutas life's work shaped much of the field of pre-Indo-European archeology (7000-3000 BC). Gimbutas produced two copiously illustrated, oversized books accessible to a nonscientific audience, The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess. A final, smaller work illuminates the continuity between scores of religious symbols from the cultural flowering of Neolithic Old Europe in the fifth millennium B.C. to European folk cultures of the modern era. The imagery of goddesses and gods, symbols and signs, sacred script, temples, burial practices and social structure in Old Europe before 4400 BC reveals the sophisticated degree of abstraction and artistry in the expression of the Old European cyclical sense of birth, maturation, death and regeneration.

The Old Europeans were working the land, building cities, creating their elegant pottery, worshipping in temples sometimes miscalled palaces or fortified settlements. Cultivated cereals and domesticated animals which spread to Europe are found first in archaeological sites of the Middle East. The spread from the center of origin, at an average rate of 1 km per year, is quite regular in time. The radiation beginning 10,000 years B.P. could have been cultural (the technology diffused) or demic (the farmers moved) or both. The 14C dates have been shown to be compatible with a demic spread. Neolithic migrants from Anatolia (Turkey), who established the first European farming communities in Greece at around 6500 BC, spoke Indo-European (IE) languages. From here, further population growth and expansion spread their economy and language to the rest of Europe.

The Indo-European tribes came and saw and conquered. What cultural advantage might have allowed the invaders and their descendants to establish their language over such a wide area. Recent archaeological evidence for horseback riding at the Sredny Stog site of Dereivka in Ukraine around 4000 BC suggests that the spread of Kurgan people might have found an initial boost not in the process of riding alone but rather in the addition of riding to preexisting agriculture and herding. The invention of the wheel [archaeological records of wagon transport in Kurgan graves in the steppes west of the Urals have been radiocarbondated from 3000 BC or earlier to around 2200 BC; archaeological evidence has been documented in the Sintashta-Petrovka complex in the steppes east of the Ural mountains within a radiocarbon-calibrated time interval (2o) of 2137-1938 BC for horse draft and spoked wheel chariots probably provided further economic and military advantages that accelerated the expansion of Kurgan people into most of Europe.