Why would hunters focus on the animals most able to put up a good fight, rather than the young, old, or lame? In a 1998 study in the journal Antiquity, Levine reported that horse meat is much higher in healthy, polyunsaturated fats than is fat from ruminants, such as cows and sheep. The ancients wouldn't have known about polyunsaturated fats, but they might have known that horsemeat is healthier to eat, and that its fat was a more easily digestible baby food than other kinds of fat.
"When I interviewed [modern] Kazakhs, I found that horse fat and camel hump were the most desirable for weaning food,” she says. “These are highly digestible foods for babies.” They are often given to infants mixed with pasta, or simply cut into small lumps for them to suck on, she adds.
If you're hunting horses, therefore, “what you want is a big, fat male.” Not to mention that if you're stalking a herd of horses, the stallion will turn to attack, protecting the mares. “The result is that the humans will kill the stallion first,” she says. “And if you're hunting for meat, that's all you need."
Her conclusion: the Botai used hunting tactics that killed off entire herds; the people of Dereivka stalked individual animals, favoring stallions in the prime of life. There is no need, she says, to presume that either group was raising domestic horses for slaughter.
But Olsen has still more evidence to back up her belief that the Botai had mastered horsemanship. One clue comes from the manner in which they made their stone tools. Without beasts of burden, it's a lot more convenient to do so at the flint quarry, rather than lugging large hunks of rock back home. “But they brought in big chunks and made tools [at the village],” she says. “That indicates that they had packhorses."
Also, some of the most common tools found in the villages are thong-smoothers, used to make rawhide thongs, such as would be used in bridles and hobbles. Even more common are hide-scrapers—also needed to make leather thongs.
Still, none of this is proof.
"We're talking about lots of different types of indirect evidence,” Levine says. “It doesn't prove domestication; it's just interesting and possibly points in that direction."
Olsen counters that all of the evidence points in the same direction. When you put it together, she says, the simplest explanation is that the horses were domesticated.
* * * *
Bye-bye, Indiana Jones; Hello, CSI
Ultimately, the answer may lie in additional secrets hiding in the soil of the ancient animal pen.
Only a few days before the geology meeting, Olsen learned that the soil was also ten times saltier than that outside the pen. The probable source: urine, presumably from horses. More importantly, her team is analyzing the soil for traces of fatty chemicals unique to horse manure. “If we find those, that really nails it,” she says.
Chemists are also analyzing pottery fragments in the hope of finding traces of fats from mare's milk. (Even today, the people of the Eurasian steppes consume large quantities of mare's milk.) “That will really be the smoking gun,” Olsen says, “because you don't want to milk a wild mare."
Levine agrees that this would be an extremely strong piece of evidence. “I don't think you can milk a wild horse, either,” she says.
Another step is to conduct isotope analyses of trace elements such as strontium in the horse's teeth to determine where the animals were born and how far they ranged. This work is still in its early stages, but, Olsen says: “We are finding indications that one horse seems to have been born in the south and maybe traded into the village ... We're reconstructing their lifestyle and finding out a lot about these people."
For example, she says, horse rearing would explain why the Botai were able to stay put in year-round villages despite the region's harsh winters. “Horses can survive ice storms and don't need heated barns or winter fodder,” she says.
But no matter what the ultimate answer turns out to be at Krasnyi Yar, the quest for the earliest site of horse domestication continues. Ancient as their activities were, Olsen doesn't believe the Botai were the first. “What is the chance that you find the first [example] of anything?” she asks.
Meanwhile, archaeological methods continue to evolve. Old techniques focused on direct evidence, not just in the hunt for signs of horse domestication but for everything else. Classic tales of crawling through underground tunnels have their roots in these older techniques, epitomized by early twentieth century finds in Egypt, such as King Tutankhamen's tomb.
But, while the big, showy discoveries are increasingly difficult to find, techniques have become more and more sophisticated for teasing indirect evidence out of the most mundane sources.
"Archaeology is heading [toward] a lot more physics and chemistry,” Olsen says.
The trend is so strong, in fact, that future archaeologists may lament how all of their predecessors cavalierly threw away the best materials from their digs.
What treasures are we currently discarding? “The soil,” she says.
If Olsen's right, astroarchaeologists of the future won't be tromping willy-nilly over any ancient sites they find in their space explorations. More likely, they'll be scared to even walk on them, fearful of destroying trace evidence.
Sadly for those who like the drama of crumbling edifices, trapdoors, and secret passageways, archaeology of the future may be more like crime-scene investigation than rambunctious old Indiana Jones.
Copyright (c) 2007 Richard A. Lovett
IMAGES AVAILABLE
www.geosociety.org/news/pr/06-49.htm
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About the Author:
Richard A. Lovett has been writing full-time since 1989. He has been hanging out around horses and horse people off and on for a lot longer. He grew up on science fiction, majored in astrophysics, got a Ph.D. in economics, and did a stint as a law professor. More recently, he discovered geophysics and has spent nearly as much time with geophysicists as with horses, finding them to be nearly as fun and much less likely to bite. The author of six books and 2,700 articles, he is a regular contributor to Analog.
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THESE ARE THE TIMES by JOHN G. HEMRY
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Illustrated by William Warren
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Pratical time travel could make a historian's job a lot simpler—or a lot more complicated!
Like different people, some places and times in the past attract a lot more attention than others. Sometimes a particular there and then only needs a few Temporal Interventionists dropping by before every question is pretty much answered. Lady Godiva, for example, who really did do her bareback ride, but no one who saw her picture in action once wanted to see it again. They probably forgave the taxes just so she'd put her clothes back on.
Other places get a fairly constant stream of TIs either trying to change things for their clients or trying to collect information from the past. It's hard to visit Washington, D.C. anytime during the first three centuries of the United States, for example, without tripping over fellow TIs.
Then there's very specific there and thens, places and times where something special happened, a turning point, and everyone wants to be there.
Like Boston, Massachusetts, in April 1775 C.E.
I'd landed what should have been a nice, simple job. No Interventions this time by someone wanting to ensure Great-Great-Great-etc.-Uncle Ned made it to Lexington Green so they'd have a hero in the family instead of an ancestor who'd stayed in bed with a hangover that morning, or someone wanting to murder Paul Revere or poison his horse. That stuff could get hazardous, especially with so many TIs from different centuries clustered in this here and now all trying to either carry out their own Interventions or stop someone else from achieving their Intervention.
There wasn't anything dangerous in my job description. I was supposed to jump back uptime before sunset on the eighteenth, well before serious shooting started, and any travel by me near decision points or critical individuals would be finished well before then. No, all I had to
worry about was being caught in the crossfire between TIs fighting before that time to either create or block Interventions. Unfortunately, this here and now had a lot of crossfire, and as a TI myself, I looked entirely too much like one of the combatants, so I stayed as alert as anyone else who knew a secret war was underway around them. That's aside from the fact that I was trying to blend in with the locals, who were also ready and willing to commit potentially homicidal actions against each other.
I'd been sent back by the Virtual City project, whose latest plan was to record everything said and done in Boston and the nearby surrounding area on 18 and 19 April 1775. Important places, like where the Sons of Liberty had met, had long since been bugged, so you could get detailed transcripts of everything said by anyone of any importance in the city on those days. But the Virtual City project aimed to create a visual and auditory record of the entire place and time. Once all of the data from the thousands of bugs was integrated, individuals several centuries from 1775 would be able to “walk” down the streets of this here and now, go into just about any building, and hear and see what had actually happened to anyone, not just the famous people.
Historians loved it, people who enjoyed soap operas loved it, privacy advocates screamed bloody murder and pointed out that people farther uptime could be doing the same thing to us. But the law said no such project could include any living person, so not enough people who were alive objected to it. And like every other TI, my implanted personal assistant made sure I was invisible to the bugs, so no future voyeurs would be eyeing me. Historians insisted on that so we wouldn't mess up the record, which is sort of ridiculous since TIs spend a good part of their time messing up history. It's what we do. Historians love us for the facts we can tell them and hate us for changing the facts we tell them.
But I wasn't out to change anything this time. My job consisted of walking down a preplanned grid of streets while the bug deployment gear built into the heavy coat I wore spat out bugs according to its own programming. To the casual observer here and now who got close enough to one, the bugs looked like gnats as they flitted into position on buildings or inside windows and doors to observe activity inside. Each had a nice array of visual and audio recording gear that would send their data to collection arrays, which I and other TIs had dropped off in various places where they looked like rocks. If any local picked one up, they'd feel like rocks, too.
All I had to do was keep one internal eye focused on the map my implanted Assistant named Jeannie displayed my route on, and one external eye on the assorted denizens of Boston, other obstacles to be avoided, and anything suspicious or dangerous.
Not exactly safe, but not the most hazardous job I'd ever had, either. Everything went fine until I realized somebody was following me.
He was aristocratic looking, fair haired, wearing very nice clothes, and seemed the sort of guy who robbed people by embezzling from the bank he owned rather than the sort who followed someone down an alley and hit them on the head. But he kept showing up in my peripheral vision and that got me worried.
I finally turned quickly and focused on him for a moment before turning away again. Jeannie, lock on. Can you ID this guy? Internal communications come in very useful at such times.
Negative, Jeannie responded. You've never encountered him before, but he's not a local. He does have an implanted time-jump mechanism. I can't be certain from this distance, but it seems a couple of generations more primitive than yours, placing the man's origin a little more than a century before our home now.
Any weapons?
None detected.
Which didn't mean none were there. But I had to know what this guy wanted with me, and accosting him in public was less risky than letting him choose the moment. I turned the next corner as my preplanned route directed, but then pivoted and took several quick steps back to the corner just in time to meet my tail as he came around. “Hi, citizen,” I greeted him in a low voice as the crowds of locals walked past us, using the anachronistic term on purpose to get his reaction.
He glowered at me. “You've got your nerve.” High-class British accent, and very well done. I wondered if it was authentic. “Do you think I don't know what you're doing?"
"Since you've got an implanted Assistant and jump mechanism I'm sure you know what I'm doing. So what? It's not about you."
His glower changed into a snarl. “I suppose it's just a coincidence that you're planting sensors in the same area where I was waylaid tomorrow."
"As far as I know, yes.” Wait a minute. If he was here tomorrow and knew what had happened, that meant he was also probably here today. “You doubled-back? You've got dual-presence in this here and now, and both within this city?” Instead of answering directly, he smiled unpleasantly. “Don't you know what that can do to someone's mind?” No one knows why, but being consciously present in the same here and now more than once can create a lot of problems that mimic old ailments like schizophrenia and paranoia. The closer you physically are, the worse the effects are.
"That's only a problem for weak-minded mongrels,” he replied with that supercilious sneer that only a many-generational member of the upper class can really carry off. “You think yourself very superior. But you've met your match."
"Look, I'm not—"
"You won't stop me!” He must be one of the guys trying an Intervention. I took a moment to wonder what, but it didn't matter much. Everyone who made any difference in the events of the next few days had TI bodyguards secretly following them everywhere. Every building that mattered had other TIs guarding them and sweeping them for bombs and such. The people who wanted to keep history the way it more or less was in general had a lot more money than the ones who wanted to change things, and could hire more TIs to protect turning points in history. Some of them must have taken out this Brit tomorrow.
His sneer turned contemptuous. “I know your kind. Sit back safely, give the orders, send out your hooligans to do your dirty work while you pull the strings within your lair. It's a regular Moriarty you consider yourself, isn't it?"
"Actually, no."
He leaned close, his face reddening with anger. “You stopped me tomorrow, but you won't stop me tomorrow this time. Try to sic your hounds on me again and I'll be ready."
I leaned a little closer, too, emphasizing my words. “I don't know you, I don't care what you're trying to do, I'm not here on Intervention or Counter-Intervention or Counter-Counter-Intervention. I'm just working for a data collection project. Go away and I promise you any further interactions between us will be purely by chance."
"You lie. I have my eye on you Moriarty. Neither you nor your ruffians will be safe if you try to cross me again."
I started losing my temper, too. “Listen, you moron. I'm not Moriarty, but if you mess with me I'll do a Wellington on you. Understand?"
His eyes narrowed, he shifted his weight, and I braced for him to jump me. I've got a tranquilizer crystal shooter embedded in one finger that can knock out someone for a long time, and if necessary, I'd use it on this loon. But he just glanced around, taking in the crowds passing by, then stepped back slightly. “Right, Yank. Think you can rule the world, eh? And all time as well. Not bloody likely. Keep yourself and your brutes away from me and my plans.” Then he spun about and vanished rapidly around the corner.
I blew out a long breath, relaxed, then started walking my route again. Jeannie, any idea what that last little speech of his was about?
He seems to believe that you're a citizen of the United States, which supplanted the United Kingdom as the world's most powerful political entity.
That figured. Someone out to try to cause the U.K. to stay on top of the world longer than it had. Since I didn't intend going anywhere near any potential targets for someone like that, he'd hopefully go off and follow some other innocent TI through the streets of Boston.
My route took me down toward the docks, where the smell of the sea, rotting fish, and raw sewage got worse. Even though the port had been
closed by British authorities since the Boston Tea Party a while back, there was still plenty of street traffic here. The narrow lane ahead was partially blocked by a cart holding some of those fish, so I worked through the throng squeezing past on one side.
Standing against a building up ahead was a man wearing a cloak draped around him, his tricorn hat pulled low on his forehead. He looked up as I drew near and our eyes locked.
I came to a dead stop, drawing some mumbles of anger from those who had to suddenly avoid me.
The boat-cloaked figure stepped forward and extended one hand. “Thomas? I'm Palmer. I trust you remember me from London?"
"Palmer?” I took the hand, which would have been slim on a man. “Fancy meeting you here."
"I had business.” Her voice sounded deeper than I recalled, probably because her own Assistant was tweaking her vocal cords so she'd pass as a male. The locally fashionable male wig helped, too, as did the clothes. Locals expecting to see a man would see one. “It's nice to see you here and now."
Jeannie actually sounded happy. I've established contact with her Assistant. This meeting is after our last encounter in London but prior to any other encounters. That's the sort of thing TIs have to straighten out right away when they meet someone they know. Have I already seen you again before or after this? What did we say or do? It gets confusing. But no problem this time.
I realized I was grinning like an idiot. “Yeah. Very nice to see you, too."
"Going somewhere?” Pam asked. I nodded. “May I accompany you?” Another nod, and we set off down the street, speaking in low voices.
"Pam, what brings you to Boston?"
"Palmer,” she murmured back. “I get really tired of enduring male attitudes toward women in downtime places like this, and even more tired of enduring the clothes they're expected to wear. It's easier to pass as a man at this time of year when I can wear a cloak. What are you up to?"
Analog SFF, November 2007 Page 10