Domestication of the horse

"The Indo-European homeland has to be localized at the area where the wild horse did not live."

"[C]onsidering *ekwos to have been a domesticated horse involves accepting some major assumptions which can easily be called into question. We don’t know if the term referred to equus caballus Linn or some other type of equid in the proto-period, we don’t know if it referred to a domesticated horse or a wild horse, and, allowing that it did refer to a domesticated equus caballus Linn, we cannot rule out the possibility that it was a late loanword that circulated around the IE-speaking area. Clearly, if the word for horse could have circulated after the dispersal of the IEs, and then been restructured according to individual dialects, then stating that the IEs knew the horse before their dispersal and must therefore have inhabited an area wherein the horse is native (and eliminating other areas where the evidence for the horse is a later phenomenon) is barking up the wrong tree."

"The Proto-Indo-European term for 'horse' shows only that horses were known (nobody doubts this); it does not mean that horses were already domesticated."

"IE linguistics can agree on the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European etyma "ekwos 'horse'. . . . But let us note [that] the animal terms tell us, in and of themselves, nothing about the cultural uses of those animals or even whether they were domesticated; but only that Proto- Indo-European speakers knew of some kind of horse . . . although not which equid. . . . The fact that the equid *ekwos was the domesticated Equus cabailus spp. Linnaeus . . . come[s] not from etymology but rather from archaeology and paleontology. The most we can do with these prehistoric etyma and their reconstructed proto-meanings, without archaeological and paleontological evidence (which does indeed implicate domestication), is to aver a Proto-Indo-European familiarity with these beasts."

"Which components of the reconstructed Indo-European proto-culture can be used as evidence of a steppic location?... two arguments are generally singled out by the proponents of the steppic theory: the case of the horse and that of the chariot. The domesticated horse, on the one hand, and the chariot on the other, are supposedly well-attested in the shared vocabulary and are particularly valorized in the earliest Indo-European mythologies, where the sacrifice of a horse is the ultimate royal sacrifice... The most common root for the horse is certainly found in a significant number of Indo-European languages... Its absence in Slavic is all the more surprising since the historical “cradle” of the Slavs is often said to be located in the North Pontic Steppes, or close by, precisely where the earliest domestication of the horse is reputed to have occurred."

"The significance attached to the fact that the Indogermans were acquainted with the horse . . . may have been exaggerated. We do not know the precise meaning of the Indogermanic words in question; we do not know whether they mean the domesticated or the wild animals." ... "it is difficult to see how these names can be safely used for determining the original home of the Indogermans"."

"All things considered, nothing allows us to take the horse as a privileged marker of the presence of Indo-European, Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan speakers. It follows that the entire archaeological and linguistic reasoning proposed by D. Anthony is tautological, to the extent that it only shows that in Indo-European languages the vocabulary of horse and chariot is Indo-European... It would have been necessary to show that the lexicon of the horse and chariot in non-Indo-European populations is Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, etc. by loan. However, JANFIUNEN 1998 showed for the horse (as well as domestication, horse riding?) a diffusion in oriental Asia which is not based on an Indo-European origin."

"The lack of a clear Proto-Indo-European word for 'donkey‘, given the presence of domesticated donkeys throughout most of the territory where horses were domesticated and where the Indo-European tribes must have lived, can be explained by assuming that *ekhwos was originally used with the meaning 'donkey‘ as well as 'wild horse; horse‘. ...[the PIE speakers lived in] Central and Eastern Asia, where paleozoological data show that the domesticated donkey is a recent introduction."

"The Indo-European homeland need not be identical to the area of horse domestication, but should be connected to it. The ways in which names and technical knowledge . . . spread should be explored."

"If horseback riding really did began at the turn of the IV mil. B.C. before the dispersal of Proto-Indo-European, it did not leave traces in the vocabulary of the later dialects. . . . Thus it cannot be proven that this type of ancient . . . horseback riding had originally been connected with Indo-Europeans."

"The significance of the horse for the understanding of the distribution of early Indo-European has been much exaggerated."

"As Renfrew put it in his archly-titled review of Mallory’s book – ‘They ride horses, don’t they?’ – the horse has assumed “an almost mythical significance in traditional Indo-European studies”."