Since the so-called “Ancient DNA Revolution” of the past decade, which has yielded many new insights into the genetic prehistory of Europe and large parts of Asia, it can no longer be doubted that the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe and Central and South Asia were brought there from the late fourth millennium BCE onward by population groups from the Pontic–Caspian steppes who had belonged to the archaeologically defined Yamnaya culture.1 We may therefore assume that the population groups bearing the Yamnaya culture can practically be equated with the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European languages of Europe and Asia, and that the spread of the Indo-European language family is a direct consequence of these migrations of Yamnaya individuals into Europe and Asia.

Linking the distribution of wheeled transport to the evolution of language is a strategy often employed to locate the Indo-European (IE) motherland and trace the formation of various Indo-European languages in different parts of the Old World. The underlying assumption is that archaeological assemblages that are separate in space but similar in appearance represent people speaking dialects of the same language. The chronology, sources, and spatiality of the IE migrations, however, remain topics of heated discussion. Specifically, researchers disagree on which early archaeological phenomenon represents the source of early IE migration (Grigoriyev 2002; Anthony 2007; Allentoft et al. 2015; Klejn et al. 2017).

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that a combination of genetics, archaeology, and historical-comparative linguistics is the only sensible way to reach a deeper and more subtle understanding of the Indo-European question. By now, there is practically general agreement that at the very least, “Indo-Tocharian,”1 defined as the predecessor of all branches of the Indo-European family with the exception of Anatolian, originated in the Pontic–Caspian steppe. The speakers of this common language have been archaeologically connected with the Yamnaya horizon, later continued in northern Europe as the Corded Ware culture.2

The transformation of the prehistoric societies of the northern Eurasian Bronze Age is associated with the emergence and spread of not only basic production industries, i.e. agriculture and animal raising, but also related industries. Sherrat (1997) has called this a “secondary product revolution,” accompanied by the implementation of innovative technologies for new products and forms of consumption. In northern Eurasia, the Middle and Late Bronze Age was a period when prehistoric societies underwent complex social and economic transformations. These changes included the introduction of new technologies of wool production and the making of wool fiber, as well as the spread of this technology. The spread of wool textiles in the third millennium BC is associated with the cultures of the South Caucasus (Kvavadze 2016) and the steppe Catacomb culture of the Lower Don region and Kalmykia (Shishlina et al. 1999; 2020). In the Late Bronze Age, at the beginning of the second millennium BC, the area where wool fibers were used included both the forest steppe and the steppe belt of the Early Srubnaya culture, as well as the forest belt of the Central Russian Pozdnyakovo culture; it extended as far as the Andronovo (Alakul, Fedorovo) world of the Trans-Ural region and North Kazakhstan (Orfinskaya & Golikov 2010; Azarov et al. 2016; Medvedeva et al. 2017) (Fig. 17.1).

Over the last several years, it has become clear that Central and Western Europe witnessed an enormous transformation during the third millennium – not only in cultural terms, as has long been clear from the appearance of the Corded Ware Complex (CWC) and the Bell Beaker Complex (BBC), but also from a genetic point of view: archaeogenetic analyses from Central Europe to the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula have revealed genetic signatures with an origin in the western Eurasian steppe regions (Haak et al. 2015; Allentoft et al. 2015; Olalde et al. 2018; Olalde et al. 2019; Fernandes et al. 2020). Whereas early publications on this topic employed dubious vocabulary, like “Yamnaya migration,” there is no doubt that the spread of genes from east to west in prehistoric times could only take place through mobile individuals. Archaeogenetic studies have also suggested a sex bias in these mobile people and that the migration process was predominantly related to male mobility (Goldberg et al. 2017). Since the publication of the scientific results for the Iberian Peninsula (Olalde et al. 2019), newspapers have even interpreted this as evidence of male hoards invading Spain and committing genocide of the local male population. There is no doubt that such simplified narratives do justice neither to archaeological theory nor to the aim of narrating a complex past in a comprehensible manner.

In 2015, the genetics laboratories of Harvard, Jena, and Copenhagen (Allentoft et al. 2015; Haak et al. 2015) published aDNA evidence for the extensive human migration that appeared to spread from the steppelands north of the Black and Caspian Seas, both eastward, as far as the Yenisei River and, ultimately, as far west as Britain (Olalde et al. 2018) and Ireland (Cassidy et al. 2016). The source of the expansion was credited to a population whose genomic signature emerged in the steppelands and was primarily comprised of an admixture of both a local Eastern Hunter Gatherer (EHG) origin and a more distant Caucasian Hunter Gatherer (CHG) origin, associated with populations from the area between the Caucasus and the Zagros region. This combination (EHG + CHG) typified the Yamnaya culture, an Eneolithic cultural horizon whose home territory extended from the Urals to the Danube and whose archaeological remains had been known to have spread westward, at least as far as Hungary (Ecsedy 1979). The genetic signature of the Yamnaya (or another culture with a similar genetic composition) was found among about 75% of the Corded Ware burials sampled in Germany, whose previous populations were exclusively represented by local Western Hunter Gatherer (WHG) and Anatolian Farmer (AF) genes. Samples of mtDNA recovered from both Yamnaya and Corded Ware burials also suggested an east-west cline of steppe ancestry, with its highest representation in eastern Corded Ware burials in Poland and the Czech Republic, while western Corded Ware females appeared to derive from local populations (Juras et al. 2018).

The importance of metal for an understanding of the international Beaker culture is well established, whether as a driver of trade connections and other forms of exchange, or as a material expression of ethnicity, ideology, or social relations. While copper and gold were used in earlier times in Europe, Beaker groups can be associated with a spread of metallurgical knowledge across the Atlantic zone during the later third millennium BC. This chapter will consider long-distance networks of metal production and supply in relation to the mobility of the Beaker culture. The nature of those connections will be explored, whether they involved migration of ethnic groups or the small-scale movement of specialists, their ideas and material culture, through trade and other forms of exchange. The implications for genetic and language origins will be considered, with a focus on connections between Iberia, France, and Ireland in that period.

In the literature (e.g., Anthony 2007: 35–37), it is often stated that we can reconstruct five words of wheel and wagon terminology for Proto-Indo-European (PIE), viz. the words for ‘wheel’ (2×), ‘axle’, ‘thill’, and the verb ‘to convey in a vehicle’

It does not often happen that linguistic and archaeological sources allow the creation of a coherent narrative: they are usually separated from each other in time and space and do not meet the necessary prerequisites for a comparative analysis. The archaeological facts must form a clear pattern and demonstrate the existence of a cultural stereotype; the linguistic attribution of the population to which the analyzed archaeological sites belong must be uncontroversial; and, finally, the linguistic sources must provide sufficient information about that cultural stereotype.

Between 3000 and 2500 BCE, populations derived genetically from individuals assigned to the Yamnaya archaeological culture migrated out of their steppe homeland eastward to the Altai Mountains and westward into the Hungarian Plain and southeastern Europe, an east–west range of 5,000 km across the heart of the Eurasian continent (Allentoft et al. 2015; Narasimhan et al. 2019). In Europe, their descendants created the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker horizons (Haak et al. 2015; Frînculeasa et al. 2015; Olalde et al. 2018), establishing a large part of the genetic ancestry in modern Europeans and probably their linguistic ancestry in the Indo-European language family as well (Anthony 2007; Reich 2018). The Yamnaya archaeological culture (or “cultural-historical community,” in Soviet archaeological jargon) has consequently become a focus of wide interest. One debated subject that is perhaps most relevant for understanding the outbreak of long-distance migrations is the nature of the Yamnaya pastoral economy – were they nomads? This essay addresses Yamnaya nomadism as an innovation that opened the Eurasian steppes to productive human exploitation. It does not consider nomadic pastoralism in other parts of the world. Because the Yamnaya culture is little known or understood by Western archaeologists, I begin with an overview of Yamnaya chronology and variability.

In the past couple of years, we have witnessed how new techniques for the study of ancient biomolecules have disrupted the study of the human past and reshaped the research arena (Cappellini et al. 2018). Traditionally, only two lines of evidence have been available for human prehistory: that of prehistoric archaeology and that of historical linguistics. Now we are so fortunate as to witness these being supplemented with a third, entirely independent line of evidence, viz. palaeogenetics. The consequences of this addition can safely be called spectacular.

Recent chemical and isotopic sourcing of copper alloys, mostly from Scandinavia but some also from Britain (Ling et al. 2013; 2014; Melheim et al. 2018; Radivojević et al. 2018), point to a production–distribution–consumption system that connected the South with the North along the Atlantic façade during the period 1400/1300 to 700 BC. Up to now, Scandinavia has not been directly related to the Atlantic Bronze Age of this time. Parallel to these discoveries, aDNA evidence has revealed a bidirectional north–south genetic flow at nearly the same time, 1300 to 800 BC, as early European farmer (EEF) ancestry rose in southern Britain and fell in the Iberian Peninsula, accompanied there by a converse rise in steppe ancestry (Patterson et al. 2021). It appears, therefore, that people as well as metals were on the move during a period of intensified contacts across Europe’s westernmost lands in the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Thus, there arose a network comparable to that established earlier in connection with the Beaker phenomenon, one coinciding with a comparably significant transformation of the region’s populations (Olalde et al. 2018; Koch & Fernández 2019).

As I have already discussed the field of Indo-European textile vocabulary on various occasions,1 I will here concentrate on the etymological status and time horizon of the word for ‘wool’. By way of introduction, it will suffice just to recapitulate a few main points.

How do virtually identical burial rituals and worldviews emerge among widely dispersed communities? Five thousand years ago, preliterate Corded Ware communities throughout Europe achieved this remarkable feat. For half a millennium, these communities performed near-identical burial rituals in an area that extends from the Volga to the Rhine. What processes shaped such durable uniformity?