Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>Still, the origin of the wheel is usually thought to be in Mesopotamia (e.g.
>Sharrett).

-- this is, I think, an unresolvable question.  The use of the wheel appears
at such very "compressed" dates over so much of Eurasia that it's hard to say
whether it spread from Point A to Point X or vice-versa.  The most one can
say is that it's unlikely to have been invented independently at so many
contiguous points so close in time.

On a related subject, it _is_ fairly safe to say that the chariot (limiting
the word to light vehicles with two spoked wheels) didn't appear first in
Mesopotamia -- or in the near east.  At present, the evidence would seem to
indicate a northern Indo-Iranian origin for it, although a rather early one
-- late third millenium, which would be prior to the I-I entry into the
Middle East, Iran, or India.

A pity the Sinashta charioteers didn't write their word for "one hundred" on
the bronzework of the horse-harness, so we could date satemization... 8-).

And even if it wasn't a PIE-period development, it certainly spread very far,
very fast.  Eg., the Tocharian word for "army" seems to derive from a term
for "wheels", and there were chariots in Scandinavia, of all places, by the
14th century BCE -- no more than 8 centuries after the burials east of the
Urals.