The Horse

by Wendy Williams

  There is also plenty of evidence of humans eating horses as they migrated out of Africa. At Dmanisi, at a site located between the Black and the Caspian Seas, on a prime perch occupied by members of our lineage for possibly two million years, butchered horse bones are prevalent. In southern China, horse bones have been found in association with Homo erectus at a site dating to 1.7 million years ago. In Britain, at a site called Boxgrove, half-million-year-old bones of a more recent human relative, Homo heidelbergensis, are found near horse bones. A horse scapula there has a hole in its center, which archaeologists say may have been made by a hunting weapon. Around one horse carcass researchers have found flakes of stone, so that they believe these early people were sharpening up their stones even as they were butchering the carcass. “You can almost imagine the stone waste materials piling up between the legs of the flint workers as the hand axes took shape,” wrote the archaeologist Douglas Price in Europe Before Rome.

  In Germany, not far from where the Vogelherd statue was discovered, a spectacular cache of wooden spears said to be three hundred thousand years old—one hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens evolved in Africa—has been found at what German researchers call a “wild horse hunting camp.” Probably made by Homo heidelbergensis, these are the oldest known hunting spears found anywhere in the world. Of the thousands of animal bones found at this site, Schöningen, almost 90 percent are bones of horses. In southern Spain, at a site called Abric Romaní, researchers have discovered bones of many different animals, including horses, left by Neanderthals.

  By the time the Vogelherd horse was carved, some Homo sapiens were hunting horses in a highly organized fashion. Homo neanderthalensis in Spain hunted horses one at a time, but by thirty-five thousand years ago, Homo sapiens knew how to hunt them band by band. The archaeologist John Hoffecker theorizes that by then Homo sapiens had developed a “super-brain” ability to pool their brainpower and communicate and cooperate with each other that went far beyond anything the Neanderthals could accomplish. The art itself may have been part of this “super-brain” culture, as it allowed people to leave communications that stayed on the cave walls long after the artists had left. As evidence of his super-brain theory, he cites locations from Russia to France where people took down horse bands by working together to ambush horses traveling along commonly used animal trails.

  Hoffecker also studied a site on a floodplain of the Dnieper River in Ukraine where he found indirect evidence that humans thirty-two thousand years ago may even have used some sort of constructed trap into which people could drive the horses in order to more easily hunt and butcher them. We know this technique was used elsewhere: at another site, Kostenki, in Russia, Hoffecker has found evidence that people hunted large numbers of horses by driving them up into box canyons.

  There are also sites in France showing that Homo sapiens hunted horses in large numbers. At Solutré, nineteenth-century archaeologists found thousands upon thousands of ancient horse bones. One fanciful author suggested that people drove the horses up the steep mountain and then ran them over a cliff, but this is unlikely. New findings suggest that hunters lay in ambush along a commonly used animal trail that ran around the base of the cliff. When an unsuspecting lead mare brought her band around a bend in the path, the hunters pounced.

  The number of these horse kill sites diminishes as the ice ages ended, suggesting that the numbers of horses were also diminishing. But they never entirely disappeared from the archaeological record, and the custom of holding feasts in order to share horse meat lasted well into the modern era.

  * * *

  We think of the Pleistocene as an era unto itself, as a time when people were so different from the way we are today that we might barely recognize them as human. But in fact they were quite like us, minus the conveniences of electricity and indoor plumbing. We can see that in the extensive records they left for us in their living spaces, and we can see that, during that time, something special was happening between horses and humans—something that went far beyond the typical predator-prey relationship.

  What’s particularly intriguing about the horse art left behind by these people is that many of these early artistic memes have lasted throughout time. We can see the same idealizations of the horse in Greek friezes, in Renaissance works, and in modern paintings. The same elegantly curved lines used to depict the Ekain horses show up today. Indeed, everywhere in Europe, the horse has remained iconic. The massive Uffington White Horse of England—almost four hundred feet long, carved into a chalk hillside about eighty miles west of London and maybe three thousand years old—doesn’t look much different from the horses of Ekain. Greek sculpture from twenty-five hundred years ago shows a threatening horse head, with open mouth and laid-back ears, just as in the twelve-thousand-year-old Duruthy horse.

  The arch of the neck found in the Vogelherd horse is still a popular meme, although its meaning has evolved. During the Middle Ages and through the nineteenth century, horses with powerful necks were often shown ridden by kings and princes, so that the horse reflected the power of the rider rather than his own. The seventeenth-century master artist Velázquez showed the Spanish king Philip III subduing a stallion (who represented the people) by forcing him into an obedient levade.

  Then, in the modern era, the art completed a full circle. The horse became once again an innocent, as at Chauvet. Franz Marc’s paintings emphasize the dreamlike nature of horses. In Dream, Think, Speak, the twentieth-century British artist Christopher Le Brun placed a white horse at the center of an ethereal canvas. Le Brun’s horse is just there, floating in space, like the horse of El Castillo.

  In what is to me the most moving modern “ode to the horse,” at the Reina Sofía in Madrid, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is displayed. At the center of this stark black-and-white canvas, more than eleven feet high and twenty-five feet long, an agonized horse struggles hopelessly, trying to rise off the ground. His nostrils flare in terror. His mouth is wide open. His body is tangled and twisted. He is paired with the bull, as happened so often in Pleistocene art. This may not be coincidental, since Picasso was enamored with Ice Age art.

  Guernica was occasioned by a real event, the world’s first carpet bombing of a civilian village. On April 26, 1937, German and Italian bombers, at the behest of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, flew over the Basque town of Guernica, not far from where the Pottok horses roam today. The planes killed the town’s animals, women, and children while the men were away working. Picasso began Guernica only days later.

  When I visited, groups of somber people stood quietly.

  I asked Sebastián Jurado Piqueras, a guide in the hall, to explain the horse.

  “For me,” he said, “the horse is the most important character here. His tongue is pointed because his scream of pain cuts like a knife. He shows a suffering of the people that is so profound that it cannot be expressed in words.”

  Picasso himself refused to explain the horse or the bull. He was as silent on that subject as the Pleistocene artists he so admired.

  Once, when pressed heavily, he replied: “This bull is a bull, and this horse is a horse.”

  7

  THE PARTNERSHIP

  … a man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.

  —JOHN STEINBECK, The Red Pony

  In the fall of 2013, more than fifty free-roaming New Forest ponies in Britain’s New Forest National Park died because of a climate anomaly in the warming Atlantic. That year’s spring rains had been excessive, flooding large expanses of Europe. The summer had been hot. The forest’s plentiful oak trees were fruitful. By mid-autumn, a mass of acorns covered the forest floor.

  Horses love acorns.

  In fact, when it comes to acorns, most horses just cannot help themselves. Sadly, what heroin is to people, acorns are to horses: an addiction that kills. The tannins and other toxins in acorns overwhelm the horse’s kidneys, which then shut down. The horse becomes lethargic and dehydrated. He ev
entually dies. There is no cure.

  Horses are immensely powerful animals, but in certain ways they are terribly, awfully fragile. People who partner with horses know that they must keep acorns out of paddocks and pastures and that they must not allow the horses to eat even the leaves of oak trees. Some owners with oak in their pastures fence the oak off, taking care to pick up fallen acorns. Others remove the trees entirely.

  For more than a thousand years, the people of the New Forest have partnered up with the horses who roam there, protecting them by releasing pigs into the woodlands when the acorns begin to fall. Pigs love acorns as much as horses do—and they can eat all they want without getting sick. Local folk annually release several hundred pigs to clean up the acorns before the horses can get to them. This partnership in the New Forest has existed for at least a thousand years.

  But in 2013 the pigs failed in their duty. The acorn crop was so large that even twice the normal number of pigs could not eat enough to keep the horses safe.

  The horses ate the acorns and died.

  Given the wide range of foods that wild horses eat—brush in the American West; beach grass along the southern Atlantic coast; tree bark at winter’s end; sea peas on Sable Island—it seems odd that horses never evolved the ability to eat acorns. At the very least, you would think they would have evolved the instinct not to eat them. That never happened. There may be an explanation for this: For most of the horse’s 56-million-year evolutionary history, oak trees and horses did not commonly encounter each other. For the most part, oaks did not grow where horses grazed, and if they did grow in horse territory, they were few in number.

  That changed when the ice finally disappeared from most of Europe. Vast oak forests spread northward to cover the continent, just as they did in parts of North America. Oaks are unusual trees. Having originated long ago in what’s now China, during the days of the supercontinent Pangaea, oaks were not immediately able to survive in many of the world’s other ecosystems, but some species did spread, albeit rather slowly. At Ashfall, about 14 million years ago, at least twenty different horse species roamed in Nebraska. Not far from there, a fossilized oak tree has been found, indicating that oaks did exist in the area. But scientists know that those conditions did not continue. Recall that a layer of caliche—hardpan—has been found just on top of the layer containing the numerous horses (and the one oak tree), indicating a “significant drying event,” in the words of Mike Voorhies. Following that drying, researchers found only five species of horses at Ashfall—and no oak trees.

  But after the ice melted, oaks became prolific. They “positively sprinted” northward, in the words of Bill Streever, the biologist and author of Cold. More than six hundred oak species now grow worldwide. Like horses, they are tremendously versatile. Some produce acorns that are highly toxic, not just to horses, but to humans and many other mammals (except for pigs). Other oak species produce acorns that are less toxic, but that if eaten in large enough quantities can still poison an animal.

  Oaks are not the only trees that are toxic to horses. Helicopter seeds from the tree Acer pseudoplatanus—a common species of tree—cause an often fatal myopathy, a wasting of the muscles. The American persimmon tree causes colic; the black locust tree causes cardiac arrhythmias; the chokecherry and black cherry bring about a fatal cyanide poisoning. Horses had quickly adapted to life on the open grasslands, but the sudden spread of forests may have been too much for them.

  The spread of mixed oak forests was likely one of many ecological changes that helped bring about the extinction of horses in North America and the diminishment of horse numbers in Europe and parts of Asia. Even if a horse survives an acorn binge, the toxins can cause terrible damage. Pregnant mares will abort their foals, for example, limiting the number of offspring in the younger generation.

  The British archaeologist Robin Bendrey is one of the leading scientists who agree that climate—and the subsequent ecosystem changes—rather than human hunting played a major role in the extinction of horses in North America and the near extinction of horses in Europe. “We’re moving away from the blitzkrieg hypothesis—but it’s become solidified in the literature and it’s hard to shift. We’re thinking that this was a much more nuanced thing, a question of animals expanding and contracting, of changing environments,” Bendrey told me. He cautioned that the record in Europe is “sketchy” for the five thousand years following the end of the Pleistocene, so that it’s difficult to say anything definitive.

  It is true that the record is sketchy in Europe, but it’s at least more thorough than the North American record. The available information points to a changing climate that shifted ecosystems, spreading thick forests over once-open plains. Europe and Asia changed in other ways as well. The land not covered in mixed oak forests was often instead covered by the encroaching sea. When the ice melted, sea levels rose. The levels never got as high* as they were during the days of the Eocene, when much of Europe was islands, but the sea did eat away substantially at the land.

  To understand the magnitude of the shift, it’s helpful to think about what Ice Age life was like for Eastern Hemisphere horses before the ice disappeared. Roughly seventeen thousand years ago, the Great Northern European Plain was a wide-open, extensive grassland paradise. In the millennia following the Last Glacial Maximum, dated to roughly twenty thousand years ago, when ice from the north had reached its greatest southerly extent, had he been so inclined, a horse could have easily wandered from the westernmost edge of the plain, where Galicia now is, all the way east through central Europe to the Ural Mountains. From there the horse could have wandered north of the Caspian Sea and on into the center of Asia. He could have loped over the rolling land of Mongolia to finally arrive in Siberia. On each leg of his journey he would have found good pasturage and a gentle topography. There would have been few rugged mountain ranges to deter him.

  Had he not been inclined to travel to Asia, he might have opted for a northern route. The horse would have been able to travel quite far toward Scotland without having to swim. He could have walked from Germany to London and points north without ever seeing salt water.

  The wide plain was also a land of opportunity for people, with fabulous hunting. Researchers suggest that the people living in refuges such as northern Spain and southwestern France may have traveled up there to hunt in the summertime. Other people may well have lived there year-round. Evidence of their presence is plentiful: fishermen have dredged up artifacts of Ice Age human activity, including plenty of mammal bones and horse bones, from the bottom of the North Sea.

  For horses and humans, the slowly warming world was a genial place. We are both savanna animals—“hard-wired to be mobile,” in the words of the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe—and in those days, there was lots of savanna to explore. But as the Pleistocene continued to wind down, the rising seas flooded the region. The flat expanse connecting Germany to Britain contracted, so that the once-wide plain began to look more like an isthmus. Then, finally, the seawater rose high enough that Britain became an island. This was not a “Noah’s Flood” event, not the kind of sudden inundation that happened in many parts of North America, but was instead something that happened slowly over thousands of years.

  As the land disappeared, so too did the horses. Only fragments of their former habitat remained, inhabited by relict populations of the once-common animal. Many of the expansive estuaries that are such a beautiful part of western Iberia’s coastline are really no more than the upriver remnants of wide river valleys that led to wide littoral plains on which grass grew. The horses who managed to survive the change in climate (paleontologists and archaeologists do find a few horse bones from this period, but not many) were all that was left of the once-ubiquitous horse bands.

  Iberians believe that the modern ponies of the Basque country and of Galicia are descendants of those relict bands. The Sorraia horses found in Portugal may also descend from Pleistocene survivors, as might the New Forest ponies. Felipe Bárcena hypo
thesizes that the New Forest ponies are really descendants of Garranos transported to Britain by Galician ships thousands of years ago. We do know that at least a few horses remained on that island after the ice melted. Their eight-thousand-year-old unshod hoofprints recently appeared at a site called Formby Point, on Britain’s western shoreline just a bit north of Liverpool. Buried long ago, they reappeared when modern tides washed away the ancient soil layers. What we don’t know is whether the relict populations continued and provided the seed for the ponies of Britain, or whether, as Bárcena suggests, those modern ponies came later from elsewhere in Europe.

  This is one of the most frustrating problems in the history of horses: Where, exactly, did the horses survive? We know that they did survive, or there wouldn’t be horses in the world today. But because of the spottiness of the record in the millennia following the end of the Pleistocene, which populations of horses survived to contribute to today’s equine genetics remains foggy, at best.