Dr. David W. Anthony: “… Mobile pastoral nomadism of a new militaristic type appeared in the Iron Age with the Scythians. But the Scythians did not invent the first pastoral economy based on mobility. That seems to have been the great innovation of the Yamnaya horizon... Usually, language shift flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. Paramount status can attach to one ethnic group (Celt, Roman, Scythian, Turk, American) for centuries, but eventually it flows away. So we want to know what in this particular era attached prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto-Indo-European speech—Yamnaya identities, principally. At the beginning of this period, Indo-European languages still were spoken principally by pastoral societies from the Pontic-Caspian steppes…”
Yamnaya culture – Wikipedia page: “According to Unterländer et al. (2017), all Iron Age Scythian Steppe nomads can best be described as a mixture of Yamnaya-related ancestry and an East Asian-related component, which most closely corresponds to the modern North Siberian Nganasan people of the lower Yenisey River, to varying degrees, but generally higher among Eastern Scythians.”
5,500 years-old Yamnaya settlement in Ukraine sheds light on the origins of the mysterious Culture >
The “Royal Scythia, Greece, Kyiv Rus” book describes the famous Scythian barrows excavated in Ukraine. The Chertomlyk Vase whose scene is used as a title image of this article is in the book too.
