by Brian Fagan
I use the word partnership deliberately, for what ultimately changed was not only the management of horse herds in place of hunting, but also the entire relationship between horses and humans, in ways that were to revolutionize history.5 At issue here was one fact of life on the steppes: the quest for mobility.
The steppe extends to the far horizon, often featureless, dissected by occasional shallow river valleys. People are diminished in these vast landscapes, where distances are enormous and about the only food is game on the hoof. Hunting one’s quarry was a challenge. Antelope and wild horses fled rapidly from danger, grazed in herds, and ranged over large territories, far more extensive than those of the humans who preyed upon them. Speed was preys’ greatest protector, the ability to cover distances in a few minutes that would take people hours to traverse. For thousands of years, hunters preyed on these animals, most often when the latter congregated near watering holes or in shallow river valleys, where fertile graze was to be found, and shelter in winter. Success in the hunt depended on ambushes, on careful observation of vulnerable beasts, on constant opportunism that enabled people to cull strays and vulnerable animals. A timeless routine developed. In winter, hunting bands hunkered down in camps of dome-shaped houses, living much of the time off salted or dried meat. During the summer months, the bands would fan out over the plains in search of game. It was an isolated life at the best of times, for the land could support but handfuls of people. Most folk encountered only a few dozen others during their entire lives.
Much the same realities confronted the farmers who settled on the edge of the steppe. Their immobility hampered them. Survival depended on their stock and cereal crops, always a gamble in these climates of extremes, and on their ability to hunt wild horses. Their mobility, even under the most favorable conditions, was that of the walking distance between camps on the steppe. Then they tamed horses and rode them—and everything changed. For the first time, steppe people conquered distance. They could hunt more efficiently from horseback, drive cattle to distant pastures, transport loads on their mounts’ backs. In a way, the effect historically was somewhat akin to that of the donkey in lands to the south. For the first time, a community could maintain links with settlements and people who had been out of range a few centuries earlier. The social effects were dramatic. People could marry into distant communities, which fostered kin ties over large distances. Now prominent individuals and kin leaders could maintain personal ties with potential allies dozens, even hundreds, of kilometers away. Mobility brought contacts and connections, those of trade and exchange in everything from basic commodities to luxuries such as ornaments. Ideas spread, too, creating relatively uniform cultural traditions, religious beliefs, and values over enormous areas of the steppe.
With mobility came quests for power—for cattle and conquest—in societies where horses were objects of devotion and close affections, forged in bonds strengthened by travel and war in very tough environments indeed. The horse cultures of the steppe were highly mobile, their prosperity depending on changing pasturage, climatic shifts that altered grazing grounds, and on success in war. Volatile, riven by factionalism and cemented by powerful, ever-changing loyalties, the kingdoms that developed on the steppe owed everything to their relationships to the horse, which made their survival possible. In the end, the horse and steppe nomads changed history, tumbled civilizations, and created mighty empires.
Taming Horses
Capturing or controlling such fast-moving, potentially ferocious animals as tarpans would never have been easy, especially on the open steppe, where close stalking is difficult at best for someone on foot armed with only a bow and arrow or a spear. So the hunters often turned to carefully orchestrated ambushes and cooperative drives. Such hunts required dealing with horses at close quarters. Such circumstances must have been commonplace enough, so much so that hunters may have gotten into the habit of corralling some of the trapped mares alive or even hobbling them, allowing them to feed in captivity until it was time to kill them. They may have focused on slower-moving pregnant mares, which would then give birth in captivity. Their foals would have been more amenable to control if brought up in captivity from the beginning. This may have been how domestication took hold, through loose management of growing herds of mares, who still bred with wild stallions.
This was not, of course, the first time that people had wrestled with the problem of domesticating large, often frisky animals. The first groups to domesticate horses were accustomed to cattle management. Like cattle, horses travel in bands. As with cattle, too, there’s a lead female, who decides the route for the day. The others follow. Cattle and sheepherders had known for centuries that to control the leader was to control the herd, whether a flock of sheep or a small group of cattle.
As with bulls, rams, and boars, stallions were more unpredictable, even irascible, so nascent horse breeders may have captured more docile females that they would then have added to the harem of an already domesticated, relatively tractable male. Like cattle herders, they may also have faced the problem of surplus males, a problem solved by castrating many of them when young. Such gelded beasts were never a threat to the stallions, so the owner could graze the herd as a unit. It was probably no coincidence that cattle herders domesticated both donkeys and horses. One can envisage a scenario of close familiarity with local tarpan herds, and generations of close association with cattle, combined with growing populations and persistent meat shortages. Whatever the details, domestication almost certainly took place as a result of circumstances that varied from one place to another. In the final analysis, the herders knew what to do.
When Did It Start? Sredni Stog, Dereivka?
No one knows precisely where horses were first domesticated, but if genetics is any guide, they were tamed in many locations between eastern Europe and the Caucasus. We’ll never find a genetically ancestral mare, the “Eve,” as it were, of Equus caballus, for crossbreeding with wild stallions was commonplace. With genetics inconclusive, we have to fall back on archaeological clues. These are contradictory at best. As is the case with cattle, it’s a question of interpreting slaughter curves compiled from jaws and teeth. They can tell us the ages of slaughtered beasts, but not necessarily what the patterns mean. Unfortunately, too, there was so much size variation in wild horse populations that diminishing size is an unreliable criterion.
Between the Ingul River in the Ukraine and the Middle Volga River in Russia, the focus on horses became ever more intense around 4200 BCE, in the hands of the so-called Sredni Stog culture, a society where more elaborate burials signal more elaborate social hierarchies and the emergence of chieftains. By this time, households were three times larger than before, in a period when people sought food over much larger areas and moved frequently over the landscape. The earliest possible domestication at the time of writing—and this could change overnight—is from the Dereivka site, on the right bank of Ukraine’s Dnieper River, where people hunted horses, and maybe domesticated them, between 4470 and 3530 BCE.6 The inhabitants slaughtered nearly a quarter of all horses before the age of eight. Such a slaughter pattern is typical of Mongol horse herders to this day, but were these domesticated beasts? The zooarchaeologists debate back and forth, but it’s interesting that one Dereivka ceremonial deposit contained two dogs and a horse—not, perhaps, a surprising association, since dogs may well have been used to herd horses. Dereivka also yielded perforated antlers that closely resemble Bronze Age cheek pieces found in later occupations at the site. This constellation of finds hints strongly at horse domestication in this region, and probably over a much wider area, during the fourth millennium BCE.
What Does One Do with Domesticated Horses?
What did the Dereivka people do with their horses? Did they keep them purely for meat, milk, thongs, and hides? Were they using them as pack animals? Or, most important of all, did they ride them? Look at this from the perspective of moving around. A band of walking hunters seeking game on foot was a mere dot o
n a featureless landscape, amid animals such as the saiga antelope or the tarpan, both of whom annihilated distances at a gallop. Finding one’s way across endless steppe would also have been a challenge, a matter of close knowledge of subtle landmarks like small gullies, clumps of bushes, and watering holes. Sun, moon, and stars would have been signposts in the great arc of the sky overhead, just as they were to canoe voyagers in the Pacific for thousands of years.
People engaged in herding and farming would have spent almost all their time anchored to river valleys and permanent water supplies. Herding cattle or sheep on foot across the steppe would have been near impossible, even with dogs. Except for fleeting contact between neighbors and occasional summer gatherings or the passing of exotics such as sea shells and metal objects from hand to hand, village to village, the isolation would have meant that one encountered few people in one’s lifetime. The people had cattle, but these lumbering beasts cover but short distances daily and must drink every day, which made them vulnerable in arid landscapes. Donkeys were unknown on the steppe, which left only the horse. Once domesticated, the horse had open-ended potential, both as a pack animal controlled with a simple halter, or an animal to be ridden as a matter of routine, something entirely new in human experience.
Quite when people first rode horses is the subject of unending academic debate, largely because it’s virtually impossible to tell from archaeological finds. At first, people rode their beasts with some form of noseband of leather, rope, or sinew, which rarely survive in archaeological sites. Bits, bridles, and other equipment came into use centuries later than initial domestication. (The earliest bits date to about 3500 to 3000 BCE, made of rope, bone, horn, or hardwood. Metal bits appear between 1300 and 1200 BCE, originally made of bronze and later of iron.)7 But just how big a step was this? Perhaps the transition from herding to riding was much less than we think, accustomed as we are to bucking broncos and rodeos, also to terrified pedigree animals whose every instinct is to flee, flail out savagely, or bite. We shouldn’t forget that the first people to ride horses had almost certainly sat on the backs of oxen, which already plowed fields and served as occasional pack animals. Also the first horses to be ridden on the steppe were much smaller than some later breeds. Even more important, those who domesticated them were intimately familiar with the behavior of agitated horses confronted with the unfamiliar.
Hunting with spears and the simple bows of the day required that one approach a wild horse, corralled or not, closely, to the point that on occasion the hunter might have jumped on the back of his prey to deliver a lethal blow into the heart. One can imagine a scenario where a bold young man leapt onto a horse’s back, then held on to the mane as the horse reared and galloped. One can also imagine an individual hunter and a specific horse slowly developing an understanding of each other, even ways of communicating with each other, by voice or simply by touch. The process may have taken a long time, as riders gradually learned that their steeds would react to a gentle touch of a spear or even a finger. Hunters must have realized the importance of training, of established routines based on experience, developed through individual relationships with their mounts that may have begun when both rider and horse were young, with much to learn. Finger-light communication was the secret, perhaps first passed through lines and nose rings, and simple halters. Once the farmers rode horses as a matter of routine, the entire dynamic of human life on the steppes, and indeed history, changed fundamentally. Sedentary agriculturalists and herders became nomads, their lives tied to and revolving around, the horse, a creature that was to acquire near-mythic status in steppe culture over the ensuing centuries.
Again, we fall back on limited archaeological evidence. Judging from distinctive artifacts, Sredni Stog people spread as far west into what are now Hungary and Romania, and eastward beyond the Volga, a distance spanning some 1500 kilometers (930 miles). This is a staggering range for any stockbreeding society, probably beyond the capability of people traveling only on foot, given the severity of the environment. We know from burials that as farming and stockbreeding societies spread eastward, the treatment of horses changed. As early as 5000 BCE, many groups buried portions of both cattle and small stock with people. Within a few centuries, horse bones joined grave offerings across the entire region. The people who buried them relied on farm animals for much of their diet. By adding horses to mortuary rituals, maybe they commemorated an addition to the mix of managed animals that served humans. Thus, apparently, was born the powerful role of horse rituals over the steppe. Some early settlements on the Middle Volga have yielded human burials associated with pits containing heads and lower limbs of cattle and caprines. There are horse head and hoof offerings from graveside depressions heavily stained with red ocher. The consistency of these finds foreshadows ancient traditions of sacrifice where the flesh of the beast was consumed, but the hide, skull, and hooves were set aside and then suspended on a pole over the grave, a practice that became commonplace over a wide area of Eurasia and survived into modern times among nomads in the Altai Mountains.8
Horses at Botai
Horses had come to the forefront of local economies by the mid-fourth millennium, especially in the eastern Urals and around Botai, in what is now northern Kazakhstan, in the heart of tarpan country.9 Here, harsh winters and thin soils made agriculture impossible. For many centuries the sparse population relied on hunting and foraging, mostly in small river valleys, while remaining constantly on the move. Before about 3500 BCE, a tiny settlement of four houses flourished at Botai. Suddenly, what had been a mere hamlet ballooned into a large village of at least 158 houses that thrived for four to five centuries, inhabited by people who relied heavily on horses (see sidebar “Horses at Botai”). More than three hundred thousand animal bones, nearly all from horses, testify to a dramatic change in lifeway.
The finds from Botai portray a steppe society that practiced a form of mobility unheard of in earlier times. Gone were the days when people lived in one spot, tending herds close to home. Now they could roam freely, graze their animals over much larger ranges, and move them from one widely separated pasture to another. Horses became symbols of wealth, of prestige, with connections to the spiritual world. Botai saw the dawning of a dramatically different, horse-driven world, where constant movement, teamwork between animals and humans, and prowess in war became the dynamics of human life on the steppes.
Horses at Botai
The evidence for, at minimum, close horse management and, most likely, at least partial domestication at Botai is compelling. Of the three hundred thousand animal bones there, 99 percent come from equines. Slaughter curves derived from their teeth tell us that most of them were beasts slaughtered between three and eight years of age, mature adults rather than juveniles. They were generally smaller animals, perhaps around sixty centimeters (twenty-four inches), close to the size of later domesticated beasts, as if the herders were selecting and breeding wild horses for their physical attributes. Apparently, they managed their herds carefully. The males were slaughtered somewhat younger, perhaps young stallions in excess of breeding and other requirements. Some of the actual slaughter seems to have involved poleaxing. Judging from modern practice, two people would hold the horse’s head steady with thongs, while a third struck a devastating blow between the eyes that killed the beast.
The Botai may have used their horses as pack animals, but they almost certainly rode them as well. The riders may not have used bits, but relied instead on thongs to control their mounts, presumably for bridles, hobbles, lassos, and whips. The jaws of no fewer than 135 horses from Botai became the smoothers used to process thongs.
Judging from the thick deposits of horse dung, the people kept their beasts in corrals adjacent to their houses, using some of the manure to insulate their homes. The Botai herds were a valuable meat source, but they also provided milk. Highly sophisticated isotope analyses of the minute residues on the walls of Botai clay pots have yielded traces of the fats in horse milk. This is
the earliest evidence for the drinking of horse milk, which was fermented and turned into a slightly alcoholic beverage known as koumiss, consumed in Kazakhstan to this day and a staple for steppe nomads for thousands of years.
The Botai preferred horses to cattle and small stock, largely because they were steppe adapted and could feed through snow during cold winters without the need for fodder that had to be collected during the summer. The Botai’s survival depended on horses and their mobility, on widely separated grazing grounds, and on their ability to control widely ranging herds from horseback. They seem to have treated their beasts with respect as steeds, but also revered them as connections to the supernatural world. Dozens of horse skulls and articulated neck vertebrae lie in ritual pits around Botai houses. In many Eurasian societies, horses had powerful ritual associations with the chief deity, the Sky or Sun God. Some of the finds may represent beasts sacrificed facing southeast at the time of the winter solstice. Given the featureless landscape, the cardinal directions and changing heavenly bodies were of great significance in Botai society. The only human burial from Botai (that of two men, a woman, and a child) lay surrounded by the remains of fourteen horses placed in an arc. There are signs, too, of a close ritual connection between dogs and horses, the dogs being used both to hunt wild animals and to control herds.