David Reich

It's not so ancient.

They weren't writing, but they were contemporaries of these people, not so much far to their south.

So we really don't know what was going on.

But if you were part of a community where there is a culture where, say, the

males, as we think from reconstructions from Indo-European myth, which is probably the class of cultural shared knowledge these people were operating from, because we think these people were the spreaders of Indo-European languages in this part of the world.

If you think about this as a world where

at a certain age, males would band together and go on raiding parties and so on, and that would then maybe settle down later in life.

You can imagine a process where, built into the culture, you have a process of expansion, exploitation.

One thing that's really interesting that has actually emerged in the last years and was not really sort of strong at the time that I wrote my book was an understanding of the relationship between the Yamnaya and

groups like the Corded Ware and the Beakers.

So the Yamnaya are these groups that thrived between about 5,300 and 4,600 years ago in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas.

They're probably the first people to domesticate the horse, or that's arguable, and they use the horse and the cart, which was newly invented, and the wheel to...

exploit the open steppe lands and and and be able to economically expand much more rapidly they're the first world's first extreme mobile pastoralists but they can't get further than the steppe so they expand into europe they expand into the little island of the steppe that's in the great hungarian plain in the carpathian basin and they stop they can't expand their way of life to um

to the forested parts of Europe, which is most of Europe, and somehow the ancestry of the Yamnaya gets absorbed by the Corded Ware group, and then later the Beaker group, and that takes it further through Europe.

But the Corded Ware group is quite different from the Yamnaya culturally, and in fact a lot of archaeologists think that they're so different they can't be the same.

They have some shared features, but the Corded Ware have many different traditions.

One possibility is that the Yamnaya expand, and they encountered early Corded Ware.

The Corded Ware learned some of the adaptations of the Yamnaya, and then they actually take Yamnaya women, absorb them into Corded Ware, mostly male communities, and create a new community, and that group expands.

So one of the mysteries of the Yamnaya expansion was everybody had this cognitive bias to think this is very male-driven.

People have these Indo-European notions of sort of male-centered mythologies and so on.