mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== by T.R.Holme [9]goddessheart_forward_button.JPG (10026 bytes) IvoryHorse_VogelherdGermany_32000BC.jpg (62342 bytes) There is an ongoing dispute as to when the horse was domesticated. Marija Gimbutas and others maintain that the Old European cultures never used the horse as anything but food, and certainly did not domesticate it prior to the arrival of the Kurgans. Gimbutas also contends that the Kurgans didn't domesticate the horse until about 5500 BC. The elegantly carved ivory horse above was found in a cave in Germany and is dated at about the same time as the mammoth paintings of Vallon Pont D'arc cave in France, 30,000 BC. This horse figurine certainly gives one the feeling that the artist knew her well. Azillian_HorseswithBridles.JPG (44953 bytes) The bone and antler horses pictured here all carbon-date to the Magdalenian age, 14,000 BC to 9,500 BC. Dozens of such carvings that have been found in the caves of Southwestern France. Clearly they have bridles and straps -- indicating that humans had horses under their control. In the beginning horses might have been used for pulling. Horses could have been used to pull the weighty mammoth bones to the locations where mammothbone houses were built. Reindeer and cattle seem to have been ridden as well. Maybe even mammoth. Though very few would go so far as to believe that possible. I personally think it highly possible. If I may be so bold I would like to say that it seems possible to me that somehow Marija Gimbutas for some reason never heard about the Magdalenian horses with straps and bridles that were found in the caves of France and Spain. Because they really do speak for themselves. As much as I appreciate and admire the work of Marija Gimbutas, it does seem evident that the horse was domesticated long before 5500 BC. If we had to give a date to it 20,000 BC would not be out of reason, since many of the mammoth bone huts date that far back. Each structure was built from the bones of one hundred or so huge creatures which had to be brought somehow from whereever each one was killed to the site of the mammoth house being constructed. What an enormous amount of human work it would have been to bring each 200+ pound piece so far over hills and streams and rivers. Especially when it was a fresh kill because each tendon would need to be cut and each joint separated to get to a single bone. Short of that they would have to bring several pieces still connected together but that would certainly be more weight than they could manage. If they left the bones to sit and let the weather take its course another tribe might come along and take them for their own huts. So the smartest thing to do would be to get the entire mammoth home as quickly as possible, that means all the meat, all the hide, and all the tusks and bones. Duh! How long would it take a party of six hunters to carry all that sixty miles? --Times 90 mammoths for one house! But with a horse or mammoth to do the work the problem would be solved easily. *** I think the problem most people have in understand who the Kurgans were is they don't understand what it was like to live in the vast Eurasiatic Steppe which extends from Romania to Mongolia. The herds were on the steppes. The humans either moved with wandering herds or they starved. The ice age was ending. After a hundred thousand years of arctic cold the warm weather was beginning to return. This great change didn't happen overnight, but gradually over a period of ten thousand years. Incrementally: an average increase in temperature of a thousandth of a degree hotter every year than the year before. Not very noticible in the lifespan of a man. But over the generations the increasing warmth changed their world. Mammoth populations dwindled and were replaced by horses and deer and wild cattle. These creatures were ever on the move. The people of the Siberian Steppes moved with them. Mammothsites_KurganCultureRoots.JPG (41248 bytes) In order to get an understanding of who the Kurgans were we need to first see the broad picture, the map of Europe and Asia above. You see the Kurgans lived on the western edge of the vast area known as Siberia. This map shows many of the archeological mammoth finds in Asia. Notice that the finds are mostly along rivers or the arctic shoreline. Much of this area was glacier free during the ice age. Mammoths are thought to have followed the rivers south in the fall and north in the spring. Whereever the mammoths went the human hunters followed. Primitive man was capable of traveling long distances. Notice the distance between France and the Black Sea on this map and think about the Danubian hunters who migrated along the Danube and Rhine. That distance is hardly anything compared to the vast Russian steppes. To cover the great distances in Siberia humans needed to ride animals. The red dot furthest to the right, is Wrangle Island where mammoths lived until about 4000 years ago. A mammoth from the southern Kolima River has been carbon-dated to around 9000 BC. So it is a safe guess that a few mammoths may have survived on the mainland as recently as 8000 BC. Notice the mammoth sites on the southern Ob River. The map on the lower right shows the locations of paleolithic human sites in Siberia. Here along the rivers are found many of the characteristic round homes of the mammoth hunters with the 200 pound jawbones interlocked together. For ten thousand years these solid mammothbone huts wore into their brains and hearts and traditions. Nothing quite gave them the sense of home and timelessness than these 20 ton mammothbone huts. Their mammothbone drums were inside the huts, their whistles and flutes, their flint knives, their carnelian agates, their flint knives and axes, their amber jewelry -- all the precious memories of their culture for more than ten thousand years were in their hearts in the form of a gleaming white home of ivory. Perhaps this is why it was that when they died they preferred to be buried in round tumulus graves, heavy stones and clay topped with an earthen mound. And inside with them were all the things that were precious to them in life. These tumulus burials have come to be called "kurgans" from the Turkish word for "barrow" or "tumulus". These are the Kurgan people -- the descendants of the mammoth hunters. The area between the Enisey/Ob Rivers and the Volga River are the land of Kurgan roots. These were mammoth hunters until the mega-fauna vanished. Afterwards horses and cattle were their mainstay. Paleoanthropologists believe that the herding of cattle, the ownership of herds, created the concept of property. And since it was easier to steal grown cattle than to raise them this led to pillaging and warfare. The Kurgan people rode and herded horses. From these circumstances evolved the ruthless far-wandering Kurgan horseman. WesternSiberianIceLake_10000BC.JPG (32574 bytes) UpperPaleolithicHumanSitesInSiberia.JPG (52692 bytes) Please note that in the 10,000 BC map above the modern cities and rivers are shown as a point of reference. The blue area marks the extent of the greatest ice lake of Eurasia in the last Glacial Epoch. The Proto-Kurgans lived to the west of the lake's gargantuan outlet. 50 - Tomsk 51 - Srostki 52 - Udalinka 53 - Achinskaya 54 - Afontova Gora 55 - Birusa 56 - Novoserlovo 57 - Kokorevo 58 - Tashtyk 59 - Khemchik 60 - Krasny Yar 61 - Fedyaevo 62 - Buret,Malta 63 - Irkutsk 64 - Makarovo 65 - Oshurkovo 66 - Sanniy Mis 67 - Ikaral 68 - Ikhine 69 - Ust-Mil 70 - Verhne-Troitskoe 71 - Duktaiskayacave 72 - Ushkovskaya 73 - Osinovka 74 - Geo Soc cave 75 - Berelekh It is important to remember that during the final centuries of the ice age these people lived in a land of rushing torrential rivers. No one living today has ever seen a river so wide or so terrible as those that flowed out of the western Siberian ice lake as the glacier melted. Crossing such a river was almost impossible. The outlet that is today the River Ob was the greatest outlet, but o the west the outlet that today is the River Volga was death to cross too, many times its present size. Neither was crossable. The proto-Kurgan people who lived in this land had to stay where they were and wait for the rivers to calm down before they could go anywhere. This wait amounted to several thousand years. We are talking about rushing rivers twenty times wider than the Mississippi deviding the human race. The Black Sea cultures would evolve totally independent of the Kurgan cultures, and vice versa. 4500bc_Kurgans.JPG (39961 bytes) You will notice Omsk on the maps. Here in the area of Omsk we find both mammoths and ancient man. Close by is the ancient village of Petropavlosk, perhaps the most ancient "Kurgan" site we know of today. Over 100,000 horsebones have been discovered near Petropavlosk dating back to around 5500 BC. One cannot help but wonder when the last mammoth was seen in the area of Omsk and Petropavlosk... Of all the animal bones found in the area horse bones constitute ninety percent. So we see from this that the Kurgan people were not nearly as interested in deer or cattle or sheep or goats as they were in horses. Another early Kurgan site is the Samara culture on the Volga river dating to around 5000 BC. Horse figurines, carved of bone and worn as pendants have been found here. And after a person was buried a fire was built atop his mound and a horse was sacrificed and burned there. Or perhaps they all had a feast and ate the fellow's horse since he wouldn't be needing it anymore and it was old anyway. And then they threw the remnants of the feast into the fire. Either way, same thing. It seems clear that the proto-Kurgans of the land we know today as Kazakhstan probably were forced to remain east of the Great Volga while they developed. Perhaps they stood in their camps on the east side of the Volga and looked across the wide river and faintly saw people walking over there. And they wondered who they were, and perhaps thought of them as an illusion or a heaven. Because no one had ever been to the other side. But as the centuries passed the last great ice age was fading away and temperatures were rising dramtically. Glaciers melted into the sea. The mighty glacial lakes of Russia began to dry up. And the mighty uncrossable river that separated the Kurgans from the people of the Black Sea cultures began to diminish -- until a new age dawned, an age when the river might possibly be crossed by human beings again and the long separated cultures might meet again. But then something catastraphic happened that changed everything... In 5600 BC the Mediterrenian overwhelmed the Bosporus creating the end-of-the-world waterfall, causing the great lake to rise and rise flooding homes and farms and cities beneath it's dark waters. And still the waters rose and rose and rose. This caused the Black Sea's coastal residents to flee for their lives, to get as far away from the rising waters as possible --and to frantically push their way intoo the hitherto unventured lands of their neighbors. So the people of the northeast area of the Black Sea rushed pell-mell northeastward, to the Volga and the Caspian, and further, into the land of the Kurgans -- and all the cosmological clashing of cultures that entailed. "Hmmmph! Who are YOU??!!" "Where did YOU come from???" "Where did you get such pretty and unusual jewelry???" "Are all your daughters THIS BEAUTIFUL???" "Who is the mightiest warrier between you and me?" "How about a game of chance?" "So you are hungry are you? Well -- I will give you four cattle and one bull for the girl with the red hair." "Go away quickly with your strange language and funny ways! We are tired of you people. You annoy us and make trouble. Go back to your own land before we have a war between us..." And so it was the two worlds met. SythianBurialMounds.jpg (13638 bytes) UkraineMammothboneHome.JPG (24830 bytes) ClavaTomb2000BC.JPG (23300 bytes) I wonder if we might have failed to realize the impression the primordial mammoth huts made upon the descendants of the people who built them. Mesolithic hunter/gatherers in their wanderings would certainly come upon mammoth hut ruins time after time after time. There were so many of these mammoth bone huts, gleaming white in the sun, spread all over the best hunting grounds of Poland and the Ukraine, sinking deeper and deeper into the earth as each century passed. Weighing many tons each they would not be moved by storm or even earthquake. They would just sit there and glow like a white aura on the earth. They would be reverred. Think of it. A thousand years after the last mammoth had died there would still remain these mammoth bone huts for all to see. Two thousand years. Three thousand years. Still standing. Hunters who knew animals well, knew bones, would see these huge bones and be dumbstruck. What sort of creature had such huge bones? And then the realization would come to them that it was their ancestors who had hunted the great beasts and built the huts. The mammoth bone huts would be sacred to them, would represent their ancestors. And their awe would build and build with each generation as the milleniums passed between 20,000 BC and the time of the kurgans, 5000 BC. The mammothbone hut would be featured in their oral traditions passed on from grandfather to father to son down through the ages. As the centuries and milleniums passed the earth and grass would rise higher and higher around the mammoth bones until finally all that would be left would be a mound of earth -- and still their oral traditions would tell them the bones of their noble ancestors lay beneath that mound. This shining ivory mausoleum vision and the round mound of earth were embedded in their psyches. I believe if we want to understand the origin of the Kurgan grave we do not have to look any further than these mammoth bone huts. Songs and chants and genealogies sung solemnly by their ancient men and women and listened to with awe-struck ears by wide-eyed children would bridge the ages long gap between the builders of the mammoth huts and the people of the Kurgan burial mounds. In the oldest of the old Irish tales there is often a line that is a curse upon any ollamh that changes so much as a single word of a sacred song. Songs had to memorized and passed on to the next generation exact. Genealogies in particular. Every name had to be remembered. Oral genealogies went back a thousand years or more that we know of. The genealogies of the Bible were oral memories before they were first written down. Genealogies contained not only names, but the great deeds of men and women. In addition to genealogies, great migrations were remembered, great wars, great heroics, great possessions, great personalities, as wisemen and genealogists.... Caesar said the druids studied for 20 years in Britain before they came to Gaul. Wise men everywhere, in all cultures, were responsible for the oral memories of their people. And it is certain that each word of each song had to be remembered exact. Or penalties could be exacted. The tradition was severe. Ten thousand years seems a long time to us today. We live in an age of top forty radio hits where the top song on the hit parade today is lost and forgotten by the next generation, if not by the next year. Memorization is so neglected that it is possible that the human mind has actually lost a great ability that it once possessed. Young Jewish scholars are still required to memorize entire books of the Bible. But few other cultures strengthen the mind in these ways. So there is the bridge. Keen and exceedingly rigorous oral tradition. Kurgan children learning to sing exactly the same songs that their great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfathers sang. Telling exactly the same stories. Learning the sacredness of retelling the story exactly the way they heard it. Sometimes even down to the syllables. Sometimes, so much so, that the song is in an ancient religion that isn't even spoken by the people anymore, and isn't even understood by anyone in the clan except the priest. Sacred Priest languages exist in many cultures. My grandmother taught me the words of an old Norwegian song when I was a little boy. I still remember the words. But I don't know their exact meaning. We would think it weird today for anyone to have only oral tradition knowledge and no books, no television, no libraries. Only a family campfire that goes back a hundred thousand years and more. But this ancient family campfire was also the cultural library and school of the people. To such people as these the white boned huts disappearing into the earth on the family hunting grounds would be among their most sacred focal points. The huge gleaming ivory bones of creatures that no longer exist... What stories might they have that held more power than this? Ukraine_bracelet.JPG (31327 bytes) [10]MotherFrance_green_1.JPG (3372 bytes) [11]IberianDruid_metal_500BC_1.JPG (3012 bytes) [12]Woollymammoth_bw.jpg (3760 bytes) [13]neanderthalskull_1.JPG (2473 bytes) [14]IvoryHorse_VogelherdGermany_32000BC_2.JPG (4375 bytes) [15]The_Mask_1.JPG (2634 bytes) [16]CypriotPriestess_restored_green_s_th.JPG (3441 bytes) [17]goddess_back_button.JPG (9596 bytes) [18]email_bottle.gif (22985 bytes) [19]goddessheart_forward_button.JPG (10026 bytes) [INLINE] setstats 1 References 1. LYNXIMGMAP:file://localhost/www/jnocook.net/saturn/files/kurgan/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm#ym0 2. file://localhost/www/jnocook.net/saturn/files/kurgan/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm 3. LYNXIMGMAP:file://localhost/www/jnocook.net/saturn/files/kurgan/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm#ym1 4. file://localhost/www/jnocook.net/saturn/files/kurgan/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm 5. file://localhost/www/jnocook.net/saturn/files/kurgan/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm 6. LYNXIMGMAP:file://localhost/www/jnocook.net/saturn/files/kurgan/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm#ym2 7. file://localhost/www/jnocook.net/saturn/files/kurgan/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm 8. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/The_Mammoth_Hunters.htm 9. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/the_kurgan_waves.htm 10. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/garden_e_danu.htm 11. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/the_great_deluge.htm 12. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/The_Mammoth_Riders.htm 13. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/The_Mammoth_Hunters.htm 14. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/The_Domestication_of_the_Horse.htm 15. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/the_kurgan_waves.htm 16. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/BL.htm 17. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/The_Mammoth_Hunters.htm 18. mailto:trholme at hotmail.com 19. http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/the_kurgan_waves.htm