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wheat, barley, cattle, hone, Indo-European, Central Asia. Immwords. exchange. Bronze Age. East Asia
Abstract:
Wheat, barley, cattle, and horses are ancient domesticated crops and animals imegral for the understanding of developments across Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasia. It is welhestablished that they entered East Asia from Central Asia, but so far only vague ideas of their immediate provenance and cultural context have been presented, often in relation to the Tocharian and Iranic branches of Indo-European. In this chapter, I scnninise the earliest comparative linguistic evidence for all four domesticates in relation to emerging chronologies from archaeology and genetics. It is concluded that neither wheat net barley an of Indo-European descent, while the horse can be succinctly associated with the Ironic expansion with the Andronovo horizon. Only the East Asian words for cattle may plausibly be connected with an early stage of tho Tocharian language carried to the region with Atanasievo.
