mean, the Vedas are informative, but the people who wrote them down had migrated not straight off the steppes but into the BMAC area and then northeastern India/Pakistan centuries before they actually wrote them down, so I'm not sure how much we should take them as indicating, well, anything about how Indo-Europeans on the steppe lived, any more than looking at modern Europeans tells you much about how Europeans from the Renaissance lived.
I mean that's what Asko parpola would say but genetic evidence would say that's not the case, a study by narasimha etal of bodily remains of late bronze age in central and south Asia shows that, people who migrated into south Asia came from inner Asia mountain corridor and not from BMAC, the Vaksh and Chust culture are some what closer to the modern south Asian, but it seems that the vast majority of the Indo Aryans that moved to south Asia did so directly, if you consider eastern Afghanistan part of the wider indosphere, they mixed with the people of eastern Afghanistan 1st then moved into the plains of south Asia.
And the comparison between modern Europeans and the renaissance Europe is kinda unfair, considering the technological development that took place from later 19th century to the present day, in 2600 BCE the world was in early Bronze age and in 1600 BCE when the rig veda was codified technology around the world had barely changed, yes the means of social and political organization had but technological development was pretty slow.
And one thing that a lot of people get wrong about the vedas, is that they think it narrates the events of the composer/author's Past, but they don't they narrate the events from the point of view of Puru Bharathas as they establish themselves in south Asia, battle of 10 kings is a good example, and the earliest books in the rig veda are family books, you have verses like " Spite the Non-Aryans, the Dahyus, the Aryans", my point here is that they talk about events that took place within South Asia and the Bharathas and the Purus certainly don't see themselves that they have come from outside of the subcontinent. The migrations that they talk about is from what is modern day Kabul into what is now Pakistan punjab, the lands beyond kabul is foreign to them as is the land further east.
So Vedas are like if modern Europeans narrate events of from say world war I and world war II and the events till the time when the last veda was codified.
With This i have tried to establish the context in which the vedas were composed, the events etc, now if you analyze the verses about their day to day life parallels can be drawn to life in corded ware Europe, the Nordic bronze age, the Sinthasta culture and also the Yamnaya.
So the events and locations have changed but their way of life is mostly the same and is distinguished by it's adaptation to local climates. So from the life as described in the Vedas, it's safe to say Yamnaya people were for most of their existence were pretty settled and moved once or twice in their life and that too by not a long distance and my claim is backed by science, if you analyze the dental records of the yamnaya graves, that show mineral deposits or signature in the teeth due to water consumption and trace them, you can find two or three changes in the deposit or signature while compare that to the Huns or the Scythians or the Mongols you'll find 10-15 different mineral signature. The simple reason why they did not travel long distances was because they raised cattle and cattle don't travel long distances as horses do and if you take into account the climate back then on the pontic steppe it was warm and wet and Pontic steppe was part of forest steppe a very diffrent biome from the vast grassland that we see today and most importantly the population was low so the grazing wasn't as extensive.
Of course there might have been and infact there have been instances when the Yamnaya people became nomads once in 2900 BCE and other in 2600 BCE, the latter eventually resulted them migrating en masse to Europe and changing the genetics of Europe forever.
The Scythians are more interesting as a case, but my understanding was that the direction was the opposite of what you describe; they settled down from nomadic (or pastoralist) living in antiquity to form a sedentary agricultural society thanks to those climate fluctuations you write about and the demand of Greece and later Rome for grain.
yes but Scythians started off as Andronovo cattle based pastoralist who were semi nomadic and as central asia became drier and colder they transitioned into horses and very soon they went from being semi nomadic to full blown nomads and by 900 BCE you find them raiding lands around them they expanded into the pontic steppe and later on came into contact with early classical Europe and middle east and during the zenith of classical era SOME of them settled particularly around the black sea and the Baltic, while the rest remained nomads who were later subjugated by the Sarmatians and latter the Germanic Goths, the Huns and what remained were absorbed by the Eastern slavs ( Which is why you find A LOT of Indo- Iranian vocabulary and some traditions in eastern Slavic languages and cultures) . In Central Asia, their original homeland, some migrated into Iran and India, while some remained in central Asia and were ultimately wiped out by the Iranic Huns? or did they transform into the Iranic Huns? the story gets a bit confusing but they ceased to be a ethnic group by the end of the classical age in Asia.
I understood the term "nomad" to be meant in a looser sense indicating that the region did not see widespread sedentary agricultural settlement (as I indicated by saying "they didn't build a big sedentary civilization there," i.e. that there was no "Sumer on the Dnipro"). The Indo-Europeans were, at a minimum, pastoralists who migrated fairly often, often enough that they didn't build large settlements like their neighbors the Cuceneti-Tripolye culture (which, incidentally, would have been an even better example to bring up: they did settle substantial areas of modern Ukraine, albeit more in the northwestern areas of the country). This is clearly distinct from the "Egypt-Mesopotamia-Indus-Yellow River" pattern that seems to be under question
This is what i hate about the irrational obsession over the technicalities of what constitutes a culture or a civilization. The Indo Europeans and their descendants invented Spoked wheel and spoked wheel wagons and chariots, domesticated the modern horse, made massive strides in metallurgy, were generally healthier and lived longer lives, left opulent graves and kurgans that rivaled pyramids, and most importantly they left a mark on the world, the 4 river valley civilization that you stated, 3 don't exist any more amongst them one was replaced by a Indo European civilization and we don't count them as civilized because they didn't grow grains or had a writing system or raised permanent structure.
Look the Indo Europeans used the vast land that they found themselves in and quickly found that agriculture wasn't viable in the heavy soil it's impossible to plough the land and because of the extreme weather what little you could cultivate was lost and, what did they do? innovate, they used the vast grassland to raise cattle and they lived off it's produce.
So if we are using the word nomad in a looser sense they why not culture or civilization?
