May 21, 2021
David Anthony is an emeritus professor of Hartwick College and now a collaborator with David Reich at Harvard. Over the past four decades, Anthony has been involved in exploring the origin and rise of Indo-Europeans from the perspective of archaeology, most especially in his magisterial 2007 book The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.
In the 2010’s he began collaborating with geneticists. He provided many of the Yamnaya samples for 2015’s Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. This paper vindicated Anthony’s argument that the Yamnaya spread westward into Europe in the early Bronze Age. But even he was shocked by the enormous genetic impact of these people.
We talked about the past few generations in archaeology and its attitude toward migration, as well as possible future directions, including the domestication of the horse. Anthony also mentions the intriguing working title for his next book: The Dogs of War.