the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/5/00 12:22:51 AM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

<<   The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse bones are in the
food pits a thousand years before that.  >>

-- which indicates precisely... nothing at all.

Humans and pre-human hominids have been eating horses for more than 400,000
years, for God's sake!  Horse bones with butchering markes are older than H.
Sapiens Sapiens by a factor of two -- are you going to say we should hold our
breaths for evidence than horses were domesticated by the Neanderthals?  And
Homo Ergaster?

There is precisely _one_ indication of horse domestication as early as 4000
BCE; a set of teeth with wear-marks characteristic of a bit.

Most of the horse bones recovered from the Ukrainian sites of that date do
_not_ show signs of riding or bits; they show signs of butchering marks.  Bit
wear is extremely distinctive.

And teeth are extremely durable.  They last better than any other part of the
skeleton.

The evidence to date is that the horse was domesticated in the Ukraine,
around 4000 BCE, on a very small scale.  Use of horses as draught/riding
animals thereupon spread, rather gradually at first, through the Ukrainian
steppe zone, not becoming common for some centuries thereafter.