Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson
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horses went through the most amazing maneuvers, sensitive to every touch and knowing exactly what to do.
Breeding to maintain this level of intelligence while getting rid of the natural ferocity and cunning of wild equines was truly a piece of work. Domestication must have been a long process with a lot of mutual learning. The advantages of skilled horsemen include the military edge made famous by both ancient Greek and early Chinese authors but do not stop there; imagine the edge ancient horsemen had in herding, communications, trading, plowing, and just about every other mobile activity.
This theory has recently been supplemented by the idea that the IE peoples had the gene that allowed them to digest lactose as adults. In most humans, the enzyme that breaks down lactose—milk sugar—is not produced after age about six. After that, they suffer major intestinal discomfort if they consume much fresh dairy food over time. Among the world’s milk-dependent peoples, however, mutant genes convey the ability to digest lactose throughout life. These genes are close to universal in Europe. They evolved quite separately among the herding peoples of East Africa (who actually have more genes for this trait than Europeans do). This is a recent development, known from many lines of evidence to be a product of dairy-dependent economics, and arose long after the beginning of agriculture.
The European gene is fairly common in the Near East but fades out rapidly in the rest of Asia. There—in Central and South Asia, in particular—people rely on lactose metabolism by Lactobacillus bacteria to make milk palatable. Lactobacillus breaks down lactose into lactic acid, not only making the food digestible but also preserving it (lactic acid is a strong preservative). Lactobacillus fermentation has thus proved very useful: it gives us yogurt, sourdough bread, pickles, sauerkraut, soy sauce, salami, and many other preserved foods. Asians, using this technology, did not need lactase. However, to carry out and maintain Lactobacillus fermentation requires a rather sophisticated lifestyle on the part of its users. It is not something that dates back to the dawn of farming.
Indo-Europeans were probably too mobile to maintain the sensitive, delicate cultures that give us yogurt and sourdough, so the mutant gene allowed the IE peoples to depend heavily on fresh milk products (Cochran and Harpending 2009). This may have given them a major competitive advantage as they took to nomadic herding. They could easily spread south and east into lands lacking the gene. I think this is quite probable, but evidently the pre-IE peoples in Europe also had the gene, since we know they were relying on cattle and sheep and doing at least some dairying.
The complex of riding and lactase allowed the IE peoples to depend on nomadic stockherding and to be superior at it. This allowed them to spread with lightning speed, which they evidently did, for their languages soon cropped up from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China.
Important to our history is one IE family in particular, the Indo-Iranian. The Iranic languages and the Sanskrit-derived languages of India are modern representatives of this early but compact branch. A number of sound shifts unite them and separate them from other IE families. Indo-Iranian speakers evidently nomadized east and south, eventually conquering and occupying vast realms from Iran to Bengal and from south Russia to westernmost China. In the process they assimilated many speakers of languages now lost. They have, in turn, lost most of their central Asian territory to Turkic languages—showing how fast languages can spread widely and then retreat. Most Turkic speakers today had ancestors who spoke IE tongues.
Bellwood and Renfrew also thought the Afroasiatic phylum—whose most visible representative is the Semitic family—might have developed along with agriculture and spread from the Near East. This, too, is impossible. The Afroasiatic center of diversity is Ethiopia, in or near which this language phylum certainly arose. The intrusion of one small branch, the Semitic family, into Asia is a relatively recent phenomenon, probably going back not much before their entrance to history, with the Babylonians. The original Afroasiatic speakers were certainly like modern Ethiopians physically and culturally.
So, who developed Near Eastern agriculture? The Sumerian language (and its possible relative Elamite) is in the right place at the right time. The Sumerians spread far and successfully into the best farmland before being conquered and linguistically assimilated by the Semites. Their art shows that they looked like modern Middle Eastern people—their genes have survived much better than their languages. My money is on the Sumerians.
We will have to deal with a few other language phyla in this book. The Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, and relatives) arose near enough to IE to have exchanged ancient loanwords. The Austroasiatic phylum evidently arose in eastern India—that is its center of diversity and linguistic range. It spread east, possibly as recently as two or three thousand years ago. One branch is the Mon-Khmer family, which includes Khmer, Vietnamese, and many more obscure highland languages. Bellwood thought the Austroasiatic phylum began in China, but all evidence is against this; all evidence is consistent with an origin in east-central India. The Austroasiatic phylum probably spread with the rise of agriculture in India, about 6,000 years ago.
Finally, a fatefully important, putative phylum for Asian history is the Altaic, including the Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic families. These three branches are very distantly related, if they are related at all. Much doubt has been cast on whether there really is an Altaic phylum. (It was once extended even farther, to include Korean and Japanese, but very few linguistic scholars accept this now, and evidence is overwhelmingly against it.) The Mongol languages show rather puzzling similarities not only to Turkic but also to Uralic and IE languages, ranging from such startling word resemblances as minii “mine,” to the Mongol noun case system’s similarities to Russian and Finnish (as opposed to Turkic, which structures these things differently). However, these similarities are notably lacking in pattern, indicating that they are likely borrowed. Those not borrowed very possibly have an older common origin in the “Nostratic” universe. Mongol has three roots for “I, me” (bi, min-, and na-), and all of them sound like pronouns in various languages all over the world (cf. Yucatec Maya in “I, mine”). Is this evidence for Proto-World (as some maintain) or merely a result of these being extremely easy sounds for the human mouth to make? People tend to save energy when talking—“television” becomes “TV”—and the commonest words, especially those much used by children, naturally become short and simple.
The Turks and Mongols certainly nomadized, camped, and fought side by side for thousands of years. They also lived near Uralic peoples, and had early contacts with the Tocharians and probably other Indo-Europeans. Mutual influence was inevitable. The basic vocabularies of Mongolian and Turkic languages, however, do not show any believable relationship. No one can miss the similarities of English one, two, three, Latin unum, duo, tres, and Sanskrit eka, dva, tri, and there are hundreds of other such sets of cognates, even for quite complex concepts (Celtic ri, Latin rex, Sanskrit raja, …), in Indo-European. But try to find any similarities between (Khalkha) Mongolian neg, khoyor, gurvan and Turkish bir, iki, üç, “one, two, three.” The basic vocabulary words in the Mongol and Turkic languages are usually very different—unless they are so similar that they must be recent borrowings. On the other hand, there are some very deep and basic cognates, including the word for milk. The word for water is close—su in Turkic, us in modern Mongol—but Chinese is similar too (shui from earlier söi or swu). Perhaps we are looking at a very ancient common origin and a great deal of subsequent mutual influence. In any case, the idea that Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic are related in an Altaic phylum seems extremely shaky, if not downright defunct (Vovin 2005).
Color words are as confusing as in English: just as English has half Germanic (blue, white) and half French (violet, purple), modern Mongol has basically Turkic loans for black, yellow, and deep blue, but utterly un-Turkic words for white, red, and gray, and even a thoroughly un-Turkic word for blue (now used for pale blue). The borrowing for deep blue is significant: it refers to the sacred blue of Heaven (medieval Turkic gök, Mongol kök, now khokh; the change from k to kh pronounced like the ch in German ich is standard in modern Khalkh Mongolian). The native word tsenkher refers basically to nonsacred blue. Anyone familiar with Mongolia will know the sky-blue silk scarfs wrapped around every venerable tree, rock, cairn, shrine, and other object (including the occasional telephone pole)