I only discovered this today and thought it was worth passing along on the Gram, so don’t expect a thesis paper on the subject. This also has no relation whatsoever to lifting- I just love history.

It appears at this point that the rad-as-fuck-yet-mostly-unknown Indus Valley Culture (350001900BCE) that stretched from the Arabian Sea through southern Pakistan, northern India, and northeast Afghanistan is the culture that invented wheeled transport (along with yoga, Ayurvedic medicine, and a unique family of martial arts that influenced all of Asia). 

Like the many of other cultures who were totally or mostly wiped out by the Yamnaya/Indo Europeans after the domestication of the horse (the Minoans, Etruscans, and IVC in particular), the IVC people revered the cow (and jumping over cows, in a hilariously old timey preface of that dude on Youtube jumping an NSX), so rather than using horses they used oxen to pull carts (and the horse hadn’t yet been domesticated when they started using carts).  Those carts facilitated trade with the horse-riding cultures of the Near East and southern Russia, and those cultures then adopted that tech for chariots, which they then used to dominate everyone from Egypt to India and China (along with smallpox). 

Chariots were first found in the Ukraine in their culture, the Sintasha, was spread throughout all of the rad scalping-motherfuckers-on-horseback lands. The Sintasha were pushed out of their homelands by the same climate change that had forced the IVC civilization out of their cities and into smaller settlements due to water shortages.

The IVC people lived in planned cities laid out in a grid pattern that featured public and private baths and even had some homes with flush toilets, a mere 4000 or so years before the rest of the world.  Many of the buildings in the IVC were multiple stories high, and were constructed with a serious eye to quality because the Harrapans had the most sophisticated system of weights and measures in the world, along with the smallest recorded unit of measurement (about 1.8mm) in the Bronze Age.  In other words, these motherfuckers were a big deal.

If you’re curious, modern South Asians are a mishmash of genetic lines, but where people of European decent have stone-age hunter-gatherers beneath Neolithic famers beneath Indo-European genes, people of South Asia are a combination of IVC/Harrapan and Indo-Europeans.

“Genetic relationships to Steppe pastoralists, who ranged across the vast Eurasian grasslands from contemporary Eastern Europe to Mongolia, are ubiquitous among living South Asians as well as Europeans and other people across the continent. But Steppe pastoralist DNA is absent in the ancient Indus Valley individual, suggesting similarities between these nomadic herders and modern populations arose from migrations after the IVC’s decline. These findings influence theories about how and when Indo-European languages spread widely across the ancient world. And while shared ancestry between modern South Asians and early Iranian farmers has fueled ideas that agriculture arrived in the Indo-Pakistani region via migration from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, the ancient Harappan genes show little contribution from that lineage, suggesting that farming spread through an exchange of ideas rather than a mass migration, or perhaps even arose independently in South Asia” (Smithsonian).

Their civilization eventually collapsed due to water shortages arising out of climate change and invasion by the Indo-Europeans, who immediately implemented a caste system to box out the inventors of wheeled transport and the flush toilet.  That was super rad of them, obviously, because it only set humanity back a few millennia from a sanitation, city planning, and measurement standpoint.

#themoreyouknow

Sources:

Wiki– IVC

Wiki– Sintashta

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