The horse was domesticated in the steppes

I'd thought we knew this already from Mallory and Anthony and other IndoHittiteEuropean scholars. h/t Davidski.

But no, apparently For many years, scientists have believed that the horse was first domesticated in Anatolia approximately 5,500 years ago.

Was this Cavalli-Sforza? C-S seems like he's the IndoEuropean Thompson, except not (nearly) as toxic. He came very close to being right. And where he was wrong you could see how he got wrong in that way. Certainly the Anatolian languages are in a family, related to IndoEuropean; and certainly there was a large Anatolia / Balkans shared farming culture, with much influence on agricultural societies in the Neolithic Europe beyond.

But still: it should have been clear at the time that Anatolian was an early spinoff - a sister, I would say - not to be used in the reconstruction of IndoEuropean as such. (It is excellent at triangulating IndoEuropean; use it for that.)

IndoEuropean qua IndoEuropean was a steppe language spoken by a steppe culture among - as we now know for sure - steppe animals.