The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

by David W. Anthony

It took me, what, well under a year to read this book. Not being either a linguist or an archaeologist, I found it interesting — in more than one sense of the word — rather than good. Now Guns, Germs and Steel is jolly damn good. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language is merely interesting. Feel the difference.

It starts well enough. In general, the first part, Language and Archaeology, reads much better (and is much shorter) than the second one, The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes. This latter appears to be a collection of recycled academic papers by Anthony et al., maybe slightly reformatted and given pop-sciencey titles but otherwise left intact. Which is a shame, because the author’s indubitably fascinating discoveries and insights are buried among grave inventories and tables of carbon dating so one has to be a kind of archaeologist themself to unearth them. Why not consign all these tedious trees to the endnotes or appendices so we can finally see the forest?

And vice versa: not trusting the author, I took the effort to go through the “small print”. (In a hardcopy, I would read the endnotes as I go along, which is nearly impossible on Kindle.) I think the Author’s Note on Radiocarbon Dates is not just illuminating but worthy of inclusion in the main text, and there are a few pearls in the notes, for instance, a curious discovery of

the Potapovka horse skull lying above the shoulders of the decapitated Poltavka human. Before dates were obtained on both the horse and the skeleton this deposit was interpreted as a “centaur”— a decapitated human with his head replaced by the head of a horse, an important combination in Indo-Iranian mythology. But Nerissa Russell and Eileen Murphy found that both the horse and the human were female, and the dates show that they were buried a thousand years apart.

There is a suspiciously detailed and non-critical Wikipedia article, most likely written by the fans of the book. Still, could be a good idea to check it first before embarking on a 500-plus-page monograph.