Die Grabfunde der Bauern des Alten Europa zeigen abgesehen von Jagdgeräten keinerlei Waffen und es gibt auch keine Hinweise auf eine Befestigung von Siedlungen oder auf Festungsanlagen auf Bergen. Somit waren die neolithischen Bauern und ihre Siedlungen eine leichte Beute für die aggressiveren [1] halbnomadischen Reitervölker [2], die aus den kaspisch-pontischen Steppen kamen, und die Bauerndörfer entweder überrannten [1] oder im Verlauf einer längeren Zeitspanne die Macht übernahmen.
1. Weder für das "aggressiver", noch für "Reitervölker", noch für das Überrennen der Bauerndörfer in Alt-Europa gibt es Belege. Machtübernahme meint vermutlich cultural diffusion.
2. "Reitervölker" oder "Reiterkriegertum" werden ohne archäologischen Nachweis unterstellt (was Funde von Reitutensilien voraussetzt, die für den Zeitraum nicht existieren)
Siehe dazu die stichhaltige Argumentation von Drews, dass sich der "spread" entsprechender (Reit-)Utensilien für rund 1500 Jahre in den Kurgan-Wellen nicht nachweisen lässt, während das Rad nur 200 Jahre für die Verbreitung von Nordeuropa über Dnjepr-Don und Kaukasus bis in die Levante brauchte (was die Benchmark für den entsprechend zu fordernden archäologischen Nachweis darstellt). Drews, Early Riders, S. 54f.*
Zu den "Wellen": Mindestens Teile Europas wurden nicht überrannt, sondern Migrationswellen trafen auch auf zuvor entvölkerte Gebiete (archäologische Brüche, zB ungarische Tiefebene, oder Donauraum, iVm direkten Überschichtungen). Andere Migrationen müssen bei geringer Siedlungsdichte auf Räume getroffen sein, bei denen ein Nebeneinander Jahrhunderte unproblematisch war.
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*Zur besseren Übersicht sind einige kleinere Ausschnitte angehängt:
Logic itself is hardly compatible with the theory that for two thousand years men in the Pontic-Caspian steppe had been riding off to war while people south of the Caucasus trudged around on foot. In other ways, surely, life in the cities and palaces of the Near East was not inferior to life in the steppe villages. Undoubtedly the steppe dwellers occasionally came up with innovations that were useful, desirable, or even revolutionary, but if so the innovations are likely to have been very soon appreciated and appropriated by people in the Near East.
As noted in Chapter 2, wherever it was that wheeled vehicles were invented, ca. 3500 BC, within two hundred years they were in use from northern Europe to southern Mesopotamia. And we have seen how quickly the spoke-wheeled, horse-drawn chariot was diffused over much of western Eurasia: by 1800 BC, and so again within two hundred years of its invention, men were driving chariots in communities from Syria to southern Siberia. The use of the bit and bridle for draft-horses seems likewise to have been adopted in the Near East not long after its appearance in the Eurasian steppe. The Black Sea and the Caucasus were not an Iron Curtain.
Anatolia especially was in close enough contact with the steppe that any obviously superior technique in use in the north should within a fairly short time have made its way south of the Caucasus...
Finally, it is pertinent that the evolution of horsemanship from display and recreation to war was accomplished with the chariot. This evolution took place over about three hundred years. Can we believe that ca. 2000 BC, when the chariot was in its infancy, the steppe dwellers were already riding their horses to war, shooting arrows at each other from horseback; and that it took three hundred years before it occurred to Near Easterners that the same sort of warfare could be conducted from the platforms of chariots? There is good reason to think that horsemanship north of the Caucasus ca. 2000 BC was not appreciably better than horsemanship in the Near East at that time, and that in the steppe and in Europe, just as in Greece and the Near East, riding continued to be a challenge all through the second millennium...
At the same Berlin conference but with considerably more emphasis Hans-Georg Hüttel, who has produced the definitive catalog and study of bridle bits used in Bronze Age Europe, argued that armed riders became a historical factor before the middle of the second millennium BC.
In the lands along the middle Danube various kinds of organic cheekpieces appear suddenly in seventeenth- and sixteenth-century contexts. Although he explained the disk- and plate-shaped pieces as controls for chariot horses, Hüttel argued that the Stangenknebel (antler tine cheekpieces) would have been inadequate for controlling chariot horses, and must therefore have been used by riders. By ca. 1600 BC, he proposed, men in western Romania and eastern Hungary had begun to fight on horseback, using battle-axes and slashing swords. From the Danube the “militarizing of riding” spread (although not very quickly) to the Eurasian steppe. In this view, although much good riding was done in the Bronze Age, it was not depicted artistically because it was less prestigious than chariot driving, and the elite preferred to be shown only on chariots. Riding, on the other hand, was egalitarian, and over the second half of the second millennium BC a Reiterkriegertum spread from the Danube through the Eurasian steppe...
We can all agree that villagers in Europe and the steppe, as in the Near East, must occasionally have ridden horses in the second millennium and even in the late third. ...(Hier sind die vermeintlichen PIE-Wellen "genetisch durch") ... But that any of these riders was secure enough on his mount to wield a weapon as he rode, or in fact to do much else than stay on his horse, is a very different and an unlikely proposition. We have already seen what riding was like in the Near East during the Bronze Age, and have noted that from temperate Europe and the steppe our first direct evidence for riding comes from the end of the second millennium...
From Europe and Egypt to China both pictorial evidence and the “argument from silence” converge toward the conclusion that until the end of the second millennium BC nobody anywhere was able to ride with the assurance and competence that would have been necessary for a man to ride a horse in battle. As noted in Chapter 3, the Chinese do not seem to have done any riding at all until ca. 400 BC, and in the Near East the Assyrians were still not sure of themselves on horseback in the reign of Shalmaneser III. On the other hand, by the early ninth century BC at least some of the Assyrians’ opponents were able to ride well, and by late in the eighth century an Assyrian horsemen was able to handle his horse while shooting a bow.
We may therefore conclude that good riding was an innovation of the early Iron Age.
Siehe auch hier:
http://www.geschichtsforum.de/f22/pferdefleisch-und-das-reittier-pferd-44008/index2.html