The Horse

by Wendy Williams

  both kinds of grasses ebbed and flowed over the landscape: Sarah J. Feakins et al., “Northeast African Vegetation Change over 12 M.Y.,” Geology, published online January 17, 2013, http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/01/17/G33845.1.abstract.

  some African animals changed in response to the new grasslands: Kevin T. Uno et al., “Late Miocene to Pliocene Carbon Isotope Record of Differential Diet Change Among East African Herbivores,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 6509–14, DOI:10.1073/pnas.1018435108.

  the triumph of one-toed horses: Nicholas A. Famoso and Darrin Pagnac, “A Comparison of the Clarendonian Equid Assemblages from the Mission Pit, South Dakota and Ashfall Fossil Beds, Nebraska,” Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences and Affiliated Societies 32 (2011): 98–107, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=tnas.

  Idaho’s Hagerman Horse Quarry: Dean R. Richmond and H. Gregory McDonald, “The Hagerman Horse Quarry: Death and Deposition,” written for the National Park Service and published online at www.nature.nps.gov/geology/paleontology/pub/grd3_3/hag1.htm.

  5. Equus

  “A hoof is like a second heart in a horse”: J. Edward Chamberlin, Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (Katonah, NY: Blue Bridge, 2006), 73. This book is filled with heart-stoppingly beautiful sentences.

  The last meal of the golden-coated Yukon horse was buttercups: This narrative section is based on extensive reading as well as on a number of conversations with Grant Zazula of the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre, operated by the Yukon government. The centre is both a museum and interpretive center for the public and a gathering spot for scientists interested in research in the local area. Information about the research is available online at www.beringia.com/index.html.

  the Yukon horse: Grant Zazula and Duane Froese, Ice Age Klondike: Fossil Treasures from the Frozen Ground (Whitehorse: Government of Yukon, 2011). This booklet, written by respected scientists, is an excellent introduction to the world of the Yukon horse. It’s available online at www.tc.gov.yk.ca/publications/ice_age_klondike_2011.pdf.

  the “Big Three” mammals: R. Dale Guthrie, “Mammals of the Mammoth Steppe as Paleoenvironmental Indicators,” in Paleoecology of Beringia, ed. David M. Hopkins, John V. Matthews, Charles E. Schweger, and Stephen B. Young (New York: Academic Press, 1982).

  “a flickering switch”: Stephen Barker, “The ‘Flickering Switch’ of Late Pleistocene Climate Change Revisited,” Geophysical Research Letters 32 (2005): C1583, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL024486/pdf.

  ongoing chaos in the interior of the American West: Donald Grayson, The Great Basin: A Natural Prehistory, rev. and exp. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011).

  mammoths, and mastodons: For a great discussion of the impact that mastodons had on Thomas Jefferson and on the early years of American science, read Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).

  “man and man alone”: Paul S. Martin, “Prehistoric Overkill,” in Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause,” Paul S. Martin and H. E. Wright, Jr., eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

  the archaeologist Dennis Jenkins has found: Dennis L. Jenkins et al., “Clovis Age Western Stemmed Projectile Points and Human Coprolites at the Paisley Caves,” Science 337 (2012): 223–28, DOI: 10.1126/science.1218443.

  Wally’s Beach: Brian Kooyman et al., “Late Pleistocene Horse Hunting at the Wally’s Beach Site (DhPg-8), Canada,” American Antiquity 71 (2006): 101–21.

  Gary Haynes believes: Gary Haynes, “Extinctions in North America’s Late Glacial Landscapes,” Quarternary International 285 (2013): 89–98, www.unr.edu/Documents/liberal-arts/anthropology/gary-haynes/Haynes_QI_Extinctions2012Reprint.pdf.

  Haynes has even taken a stab: Gary Haynes of the University of Nevada gave a lecture on the disappearance of the horses for the general public at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, in February 2012. It’s available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WZ5Q2JYbLY.

  “Size matters”: For a short, delightful, and accessible read on this subject, see John Tyler Bonner, Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). And for further information, see Bonner’s Randomness in Evolution (Princeton, 2013), where he reiterates the role that random chance plays in evolution.

  6. The Arch of the Neck

  “The steady thunder”: Tamsin Pickeral, The Horse: 30,000 Years of the Horse in Art (London and New York: Merrell, 2006), 20. Pickeral provides a fascinating look at the evolution over time of horses in human art.

  Spain began attacking France: For an excellent and poetic explanation of how our planet’s numerous plates collide, read Winchester, A Crack at the Edge of the World 149–56.

  Iberia is said to have been a refugium: There are numerous papers that discuss this, but the trend of late is to look more closely at specific sections of Iberia. For a start, try Gonzalo Nieto Feliner, “Southern European Glacial Refugia: A Tale of Tales,” Taxon 60 (2011): 365–72, http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/35607/1/2011_Nieto_Taxon60%282%29.pdf.

  many of these mouths were occupied: Lawrence Guy Straus, Iberia Before the Iberians: The Stone Age Prehistory of Cantabrian Spain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992; repr. ed., 2011).

  Neanderthals and the first Homo sapiens: Recent dating of several Neanderthal sites has challenged the long-accepted belief that Neanderthals lived longer in Iberia than elsewhere, but the battle isn’t over yet. For some background, see Ewen Callaway, “Neanderthal Settlements Point to Earlier Extinction: New Dating Suggests Bones from Spanish Sites Are 10,000 Years Older Than Previously Thought,” Nature News, February 4, 2013, www.nature.com/news/neanderthal-settlements-point-to-earlier-extinction-1.12355.

  hunted horses using different techniques: Straus, Iberia Before the Iberians.

  “graffiti”: For anyone interested in Pleistocene art, R. Dale Guthrie’s book The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) is a must-read. Guthrie’s view is entirely outside the bounds of accepted dogma, which makes it a fascinating counterweight to that of many more-conventional thinkers.

  “those who praise horses”: Chamberlin. Horse, 47.

  very primitive stones: This finding is very controversial. Several research teams have engaged in pitched battles over the issue, showing how difficult it is to analyze human behavior in the deep past. I once walked over a very dry area of Zimbabwe with a local expert in early stonework. “The ground is littered with tools,” he explained, picking up rock after rock. But where he saw tools, I saw nothing more than sharp rocks. For a good overview of the argument, see Kate Wong, “Did Lucy’s Species Butcher Animals?”, Observations, Scientific American blog, April 13, 2011, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/04/13/did-lucys-species-butcher-animals/.

  clearly shows tools fashioned by Homo erectus: Jean de Heinzelin et al., “Environment and Behavior of 2.5-Million-Year-Old Bouri Hominids,” Science 284 (1999): 625–29, www.indiana.edu/~origins/teach/P314/Bouri2.pdf. By now a plethora of papers have been written about this site, and most researchers agree that tools are present.

  “You can almost imagine the stone waste materials”: For an evocative description of this, read T. Douglas Price, Europe Before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). This is another absolute must-read for people looking for an overview of early Europe and an excellent informal guidebook, since it is structured as a list of archaeological sites.

  the oldest known hunting spears: Hartmut Thieme, “Lower Palaeolithic Hunting Spears from Germany,” Nature 385 (1997): 807–10, www.nature.com/nature/journal/v385/n6619/abs/385807a0.html.

  The archaeologist John Hoffecker theorizes: John F. Hoffecker, Landscape of the Mind: Human Evolution and the Archaeology of Thought (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2011).

  Hoffecker also studied a site on a floodplain of the Dnieper River: John Hoffecker, personal communication, and John F. Hoffecker et al., “Geoarchaeological and Bioarchaeological Studies at Mira, an Early Upper Paleolithic Site in the Lower Dnepr Valley, Ukraine,” Geoarchaeology 29 (2014): 61–77, www.researchgate.net/publication/259538309_Geoarchaeological_and_Bioarchaeological_Studies_at_Mira_an_Early_Upper_Paleolithic_Site_in_the_Lower_Dnepr_Valley_Ukraine.

  at another site, Kostenki: John F. Hoffecker et al., “Evidence for Kill-Butchery Events of Early Upper Paleolithic Age at Kostenki, Russia,” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010): 1073–89, www.researchgate.net/publication/229414951_Evidence_for_kill-butchery_events_of_early_Upper_Paleolithic_age_at_Kostenki_Russia.

  7. The Partnership

  “a man on a horse”: John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella The Red Pony is the best summation of the horse-human partnership that I know of.

  died because of a climate anomaly in the warming Atlantic: This news made headlines around the world. The reported number of ponies who died varies widely, and I’ve chosen one of the more conservative figures. For one such news report, see BBC News, “Acorn Glut Kills 90 New Forest Ponies and Cattle,” January 15, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-25552107.

  when the ice finally disappeared: To better understand what happened as the Pleistocene came to a close, I suggest reading a few of the books by the prolific Steven Mithen, including After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000–5000 B.C. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). This book provides a good overall view of how the world got going again after the Pleistocene. Barry Cunliffe’s Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 B.C.–A.D. 1000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) is a fabulous book that will change the way you look at Europe.

  Having originated long ago in what’s now China: The story of how oak trees changed the world is compelling, deserving its own book-length treatment. During the heyday of the North American horses, there were oak trees, but their numbers were substantially limited. And yet, after the ice melted they were everywhere. For a brief discussion of how oaks spread over North America in particular, read Gene Stowe, “Research into Oaks Helps Us Understand Climate Change,” Notre Dame News, July 23, 2012, http://news.nd.edu/news/32154-research-into-oaks-helps-us-understand-climate-change/.

  covered by the encroaching sea: Vince Gaffney is a landscape archaeologist who has become well-known for his mapping of Doggerland, a region north of what we now think of as Europe’s mainland. For a brief video overview of his work, go to www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/caha/research/arch-research/videos/gaffney-vince-doggerland.aspx.

  “hard-wired to be mobile”: Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, vii.

  at a site called Formby Point: Local researcher Gordon Roberts, a member of the Sefton Coast Partnership Archaeology and History Task Group, a team of people who photograph these fleeting tracks as they are first revealed and then destroyed by the wave action of the ocean, replied in detail to my inquiry: “The horse hoof prints which I have recorded were not associated with any human footprints and, indeed, may well precede the arrival of hunter-gatherers on the coastline. Almost all of the so-called ‘Formby Footprints’ are located on the shore-most muddy margins of a long-vanished intertidal lagoon which lay between a series of sandy, barrier islands and the prehistoric coastline of 5000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. The horse hoof prints were preserved in an ancient, weather-hardened exposure of blue-grey marine mud, deposited—I surmise—about eight millennia ago, during an earlier period of the evolution of the coastline. There were no human footprints, nor—apart from a few red deer prints—was there any further evidence at this site of other faunal activity.”

  Botai in Kazakhstan: Alan K. Outram et al., “The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking,” Science 323 (2009): 1332–35. DOI: 10.1126/science.1168594.

  Holocene Galician art: Richard Bradley, Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe: Signing the Land (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

  the earliest known depiction of a horse roundup: Many of these depictions can be seen online. See, for example: www.rupestre.net/tracce/?p=577.

  Bendrey’s studies of goat domestication: Robin Bendrey, “From Wild Horses to Domestic Horses: A European Perspective,” World Archaeology 44 (2012): 135–57, www.academia.edu/1785218/From_wild_horses_to_domestic_horses_a_European_perspective.

  at least a thousand years earlier than the evidence at Botai: For an in-depth look at David W. Anthony’s theories regarding early horsemanship and the spread of peoples and languages, read Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  Horses thus created a new connectivity: There is a correlate from more modern times that shows how grass created the Mongol Empire, which spread during a particularly wet period. Check out Neil Pederson et al., “Pluvials, Droughts, the Mongol Empire, and Modern Mongolia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): 4375–79, www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/03/05/1318677111.abstract.

  8. The Eye of the Horse

  “The Lion and the Horse were arguing”: The evolution of the eye caused Darwin even more psychic pain than did the evolution of horses. Gordon L. Walls’s The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation, published in 1942 (reprint edition, Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2013), attempted to explain the phenomenon of eye evolution and to lay out a framework for future research. Much has been accomplished since then, and scientists now do think they understand how such a complex organ could have evolved from astonishingly simple origins.

  evolved a third color cone: Gerald H. Jacobs and Jeremy Nathans, “The Evolution of Primate Color Vision,” Scientific American 300 (2009): 56–63. This excellent, in-depth but easily understood article by two of the world’s experts in the field of vision discusses much more than the evolution of color vision. It explains the basics of how animals see and why color vision is an advantage in some—but not all—cases.

  “face patches”: For an in-depth discussion of neuroscience, color vision, art, and the recent discoveries of these intriguing areas in the brain, read the Nobel Prize–winner Eric R. Kandel’s expansive but readable The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012).

  The Canadian researchers Ian Whishaw and Emilyne Jankunis have found: Emilyne S. Jankunis and Ian Q. Whishaw, “Sucrose Bobs and Quinine Gapes: Horse (Equus caballus) Responses to Taste Support Phylogenetic Similarity in Taste Reactivity,” Behavioural Brain Research 256 (2013): 284–90, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23973764.

  The biologist Christopher Kirk has compared: Amber N. Heard-Booth and E. Christopher Kirk, “The Influence of Maximum Running Speed on Eye Size: A Test of Leuckart’s Law in Mammals,” The Anatomical Record 295 (2012): 1053–62.

  how do you figure something like that out for a horse: Brian Timney and Kathy Keil, “Visual Acuity in the Horse,” Vision Research 32 (1992): 2289–93, www.psychology.uwo.ca/pdfs/SONA/articles/11-timney.pdf.

  Ponzo illusion: Timney and Keil, “Horses Are Sensitive to Pictorial Depth Cues,” Perception 25 (1996): 1121–28.

  “Vision is not simply a window onto the world, but truly a creation of the brain”: Kandel, The Age of Insight, 236.

  horses are much better: In-depth, reader-friendly discussions of the science of equine vision are almost nonexistent. Michel-Antoine Leblanc’s The Mind of the Horse: An Introduction to Equine Cognition, translated by Giselle Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) provides a good science-based overview.

  The Australian neuroscientist Alison Harman: Alison M. Harman et al., “Horse Vision and an Explanation for the Visual Behaviour Originally Explained by the ‘Ramp Retina,’” Equine Veterinary Journal 31 (1999): 384–90.

  9. The Dance of Communication

  “Under a transport o
f Joy or of vivid Pleasure”: That Darwin dared to compare the joy of children with the joy of horses could have raised a ruckus, but the public loved the book. And in this case, Darwin had firsthand knowledge, as his house was always filled with children and his pastures always filled with horses.

  “Human beings are species-lonely”: Thomas McGuane, Some Horses: Essays (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 1999).

  The Oklahoma research psychologist Sherril Stone: Sherril M. Stone, “Human Facial Discrimination in Horses: Can They Tell Us Apart?” Animal Cognition 13 (2009): 51–61.

  The French researcher Carol Sankey has shown: Carol Sankey has published a large body of research that examines many fundamentals of horse behavior, among them “Positive Interactions Lead to Lasting Positive Memories in Horses, Equus caballus,” Animal Behavior 79 (2010): 869–75.

  the German ethologist Konstanze Krüger has studied how horses learn: Konstanze Krüger et al., “The Effects of Age, Rank and Neophobia on Social Learning in Horses,” Animal Cognition 17 (2014): 645–55.

  Peacemaking among horses: For an excellent overview of Krüger’s impressive body of research on the horse’s social behavior, see “Social Ecology of Horses,” in The Ecology of Social Evolution, eds. Judith Korb and Jürgen Heinz (Berlin: Springer, 2008), Krüger, available at http://epub.uni-regensburg.de/20253/1/Krueger_ecology_of_horse_behaviour.pdf.

  The cognitive scientist Claudia Uller: Claudia Uller and Jennifer Lewis, “Horses (Equus caballus) Select the Greater of Two Quantities in Small Numerical Contrasts,” Animal Cognition 12 (2009): 733–38.

  when the dogs heard other dogs bark: Attila Andics et al., “Voice-Sensitive Regions in the Dog and Human Brain Are Revealed by Comparative fMRI,” Current Biology 24 (2014): 574–78.

  the British researcher Leanne Proops: Leanne Proops and Karen McComb, “Cross-Modal Individual Recognition in Domestic Horses (Equus caballus) Extends to Familiar Humans,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279 (2012): 3131–38.

  10. The Rewilding

  “Only the wind”: Khadak is a Mongolian film that can be seen for free on the Internet at www.imdb.com/title/tt0475241/.