Two Steppes Forward

Razib Khan has a summary article on the Indo-Europeans and their subset the Yamnaya about what is known at this time.  There has been rapid change over the last decades, especially the last one. We now have a pretty good timeline of where the Urheimat (linguistic homeland) was on the lower Volga and where the various migrations and back-migrations were. I found it amusing to see how the Anatolians and Mittani ended up near each other by the long route home. In this case, it was definitely people not pots.

We have thought the Yamnaya conquered with horse and wheel, and that is indirectly true. But it is not entirely being more warlike, violent, and mobile (though they were) but a different result of living entirely with animals - resistance to disease, especially plague.

 Ok, so they were tall, dark, robust, maybe a bit plodding and prone to mentally instability. And how exactly does that package add up to inexorably overrunning half of Eurasia in the space of a few centuries? Here, a 2025 paper lays out something critical for any pre-modern population: “Our findings provide direct evidence that this lifestyle change [pastoralist nomadism] resulted in an increased infectious disease burden. They also indicate that the spread of these pathogens increased substantially during subsequent millennia, coinciding with the pastoralist migrations from the Eurasian Steppe.” Early forms of plague were pervasive in Neolithic Europe in the centuries after 3000 BC; it is likely, judging by the emergence of disease resistance among the Yamnaya that the ultimate origin was the Eurasian steppe, just as it would be thousands of years later during the outbreaks that occurred in 6th-century Europe and during the Middle Ages’ Black Death. David Anthony has argued that the Yamnaya were the first truly pastoralist nomadic people, relying entirely on their herds on the steppe, ushering in a mobile lifestyle that endures down to the modern era in Kazakhstan and Mongolia. And genetic evidence finds changes in adaptation to diseases at the end of the Neolithic and during the early Bronze Age among these first nomads; it seems likely that the Yamnaya inoculated themselves early against the plagues that they would unwittingly unleash upon the agriculturalists of Europe. Their third-millennium record of routs and conquests across an entire continent may have prefigured the similarly inadvertent biological warfare of Europeans against Amerindians some four millennia later.

I don't know how much of this article is behind the paywall. But all the extra studying we did during Covid about the history of disease began even before the disease hit us.