Pre-Bronze Age Pure Horse People in the steppes of Kazachstan

[Joerg]

Despite "dissing" people being incited to do their pre-history homework in the "how to attract players to RQG" thread, I just watched a nice lecture on the development of horse-riding in the central Eurasian steppes which has quite a few interesting data that could be applied to the horse nomads of central Genertela - including a different group of pure horse people - the Botai culture - and standard pastoralist horse, cattle, sheep and goat breeders of the Yamnaya and Afanasievo cultures presumed to be the origin of Indo-European languages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QapUGZ0ObjA

So, if you are interested in the origins of the real world horse nomads, spend some  40 minutes on this video. It also gives an interesting exposition of the role of upland forests in the steppes.

 

Edited May 19, 2019 by Joerg
closing quotation marks

[EricW]

There’s a terrific fiction book The year of the Horsetails, about a refugee from a Eurasian horse nomad army who assassinated a senior officer finding shelter with peaceful villagers. Then the nomads hunting the refugee find his refuge, and report back what the found - a people ripe for the plucking.

Great reading for a bit of inspiration into the life of that period.

[JanPospisil]

I don't wanna say this one's outdated, because iirc there isn't anything exactly wrong being said. But the field's definitely moved quite a bit in the past 8 years.

I think there are even newer talks by Mallory, Mair and others on Youtube.