The <kurgan> graves of the steppe provide some of the best - although not the earliest - evidence on wheeled vehicles before the age of the chariot. Especially after <ca.> 2500 BC, the survivors of a well-to-do man or woman often placed in the grave the wagon - or a part of the wagon - on which the deceased had been transported to the burial-site. More than two hundred such burial vehicles have been found on the steppe, thirty of the earliest being in Pontic-Caspian pit-graves and "catacomb" graves.[74] The practice was not limited to the steppe: the same kind of burial is well attested south of the Caucuses (in the so-called Transcaucasion culture) and also in eastern Europe. On the basis of calibrated carbon dates, Anthony assigned the earliest wagon burial thus far discovered in the steppe to the end of the fourth millennium.[75] Although most of the burials seem to belong in the second half of the third millennium BC, fairly late in the Yamnaya period, analogous burials in eastern Europe indicate that the pastoralists were using wheeled vehicles before 3000 BC.[76] Perhaps in the fourth millennium wagons were still too precious to be sent to the underworld.
Wheeled vehicles would have been a help for people who moved between a village in the Pontic-Caspian river valleys and a pasturage ten or fifteen miles deep into the steppe. Prior to <ca.> 3500 BC oxen and horses pulled sledges and carried loads on their backs, but what could be carried or dragged by two pack animals was less than what could be drawn in a cart or a wagon by a yoked team of oxen. A shepherd taking his dogs and sheep into the steppe pastures would have loaded into his oxcart not only food, a tent and a blanket, but also a few tools and weapons (on a cart he could securely stow even his bow and arrows). Another advantage of a cart over pack animals was that it did not need to be unloaded and reloaded at every stop, and that all night long the supplies stayed high and dry. It is therefore not difficult to imagine that the availability of wheeled vehicles may have been crucial for the emergence of semi-nomadic pastoralism on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
The invention of the wheeled vehicle may have required horses to serve, now and then, as draft animals [Me: Horses like woolly mammoths in earlier times continue to put their innate gifts of clearing snow to good impact][They can in awareness of water below ground dig wells, and their use as drought animals must be seen as a recapitulation]. We must nevertheless keep in mind that with their planked platforms and solid disc wheels these early vehicles were clumsy and heavy. Four-wheeled vehicles were especially difficult to manoeuver: because their front axles did not pivot, neolithic and Bronze Age wagons could have been turned only with much time and effort.[77] A wagon reconstructed in 1989 according to late fourth-millennium specifications weighed 259 kg.[78] For pulling these heavy loads oxen were much more serviceable than equids. In antiquity all vehicles were pulled from a yoke, and in its anatomical structure <Equus caballus> is not so so well adapted to the yoke as is Bos <taurus>. Because a team of oxen could draw almost twice the load that a team of equids could draw, it is not surprising that in graves where skeletal evidence of paired draft animals survives from the third millennium BC the skeletons are regularly those of oxen.[79] Not until the invention of the spoked wheel, <ca.> 2000 BC, does one find a burial of a wheeled vehicle drawn by paired equids.[80]

80 Häusler 1994, p. 231. His reference is to the Sintashta burial.

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Cheese would have provided a storable medium when needed, and flax was a widespread nutritious and thready plant.

Joyeux Noël to you too, <cormier>.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRm...>

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWu...>

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSW...>

On Chessgames

https://youtu.be/Q5nDqC0j5qo?si=LN0...

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