MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
familiar with the idea of using animals to draw carts of 
various sorts. Their long association with horses would in 
time suggest that these animals could pull a chariot far 
better and faster than the oxen or donkeys used until then. 
For lack of evidence we can not say as yet when this 
great idea was born, but we may be sure that to work it 
out fully took a long time. At length, however, armed 
with this new instrument of war, more effective in its way 
than the tank in modern times, the Indo-Europeans spread 
in all directions, conquering, organizing, and ruling as they 
went. 
Thus the spread of the war chariot, drawn by horses 
attached to it with a yoke, neckband, and girth, affords 
an important clue to the movements of peoples in late 
prehistoric times. It appears in southwestern Asia shortly 
after 2000 B. c. and in Egypt a few centuries later. It was 
already in common use in Greece and central Europe 
about 1200 B. C., so it must have arrived there at least a 
century or two earlier. Gradually it spread westward 
until it occupied almost the entire continent. The 
peoples of northern Italy and France still employed it in 
the third century B. c., but abandoned it soon after. 
Caesar found the Britons using it in the first century 
B. c., while in Ireland it survived still longer. 
In the Orient the history of the war chariot is much the 
same. The Aryans, who invaded India sometime in the 
second millenium B.c., had it. So had the Bronze Age 
population of southern Siberia. In China the war chariot 
and the knowledge of bronze had appeared sometime 
before 1000 B. Cc. 
During the second millenium B. c., the use of the chariot 
for fighting seems to have spread outward in all direc- 
tions from the grasslands of southeastern Russia and 
southwestern Siberia, until it had penetrated almost the 
whole of the North Temperate regions of the Old World. 
Then it gradually went out of use, unable to compete suc- 
cessfully with the later practice of fighting on horseback, 
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