Today’s issue of Science features a superb paper on a subject that has long fascinated archaeologists:  the beginnings of our long and intimate relationship with horses.  As early as 40,000 years ago, Ice Age hunters in France and Spain painted images of wild horses in their caves, clearly entranced by their beauty, speed and power.  But when did early humans become equestrians, first learning to bridle and ride these swift mounts, then breeding them for a multitude of purposes?    

Research led by Alan Outram, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, brings us much closer to the heart of the mystery.  For years, researchers have eyed the grasslands of Kazakhstan as a possible center of domestication: now Outram and his team reveal that ancient herders known as the Botai tamed wild horses as early as 5700 years ago.  As evidence, Outram’s team found “bit damage” on the skeletal remains of horses from Botai sites and detected traces of horse milk fats in Botai pottery.  Intriguingly, Kazakhstan’s modern horse herders still love mare’s milk, which they ferment to produce an alcoholic drink known as koumiss. 

Impressed by this new study, I decided to browse once again a wonderful online reference to ancient horses published two years ago by an American scholar, Beverley Davis.  Don’t let the dry title, “Timeline of the Development of the Horse,” fool you.  This is a fascinating 208-page walk through the history of the horse, jammed with tidbits worth knowing and beautifully illustrated with exquisite photos of horse artifacts and paintings.  Davis starts 75 million years ago, in the Eocene, with the appearance of the dog-sized Condylarth, an equine ancestor, and ends in 2005, with a poignant entry:  the enacting of American legislation permitting the slaughter of Bureau of Land Management wild horses. 

In between, Davis presents a wonderful chronicle of the horse in human history. Alexander the Great’s favorite horse, Bucephalus or “Oxhead,” for example, may have received its name from calcium “horns” that protrude from  the foreheads of a prized line of Persian horses.  Sapor I,  a Sassanid shah, chose to humiliate his captured foe,  the Roman emperor Valerian,  in 259 AD by forcing the emperor to kneel and act as a footstool so Sapor could mount his horse:  the shah then had Valerian executed.  And the Prophet Mohammed, I learned, particularly loved bays:  he named his favourite mount Os Koub, the “Torrent.”   

Indeed, Davis’s pithy timeline reveals in wonderful detail how large a role Equus ferus caballus played in the great sweeping events of history.  Horseless cultures, it seems, would to do almost anything to lay hands on them (one Chinese emperor, for example, traded an imperial princess to red-haired barbarians for a small herd), while mounted societies were always tempted to use their steeds for conquest.  In the end, horses became one of the first weapons of mass destruction—something few could have predicted long ago on the grasslands of Kazakhstan.    

 

This entry was posted by Heather Pringle on Friday, March 6, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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