For species that became our allies, that teamed up with us, benefits could be even more direct and palpable. The end of the Ice Age was a time of great ecological upheaval. Many large-bodied mammals died out between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago – including enormous, iconic herbivores such as mammoths and mastodons. Predators were also hard-hit, as their prey dwindled away. The cave lion disappeared from Eurasia around 14,000 years ago; the American lion went extinct around 13,000 years ago. Sabre-toothed cats clung on in the New World until around 11,000 years ago. The wolf population survived but was still badly hit – though of course one lineage went on to become immensely successful: the wolves that took up hunting with humans, and became dogs. It’s estimated that there are well over 500 million dogs in the world and around 300,000 wolves. So today, dogs outnumber their surviving wild relatives by more than 1,500 to 1. No one seems to be willing to hazard a guess at how many red junglefowl there are in the world, but it’s bound to pale in comparison to the global chicken population of at least 20 billion – around three chickens to every person. And cattle – well, there are no surviving aurochsen and an estimated one and a half billion cattle on the planet.
Wild horses have led a similarly precarious existence. Loss of habitat and hunting by humans laid low their population. The forest-clearing of the Neolithic might have provided some pockets of habitat, and a temporary boost, but numbers would continue to fall. The population of Equus ferus – the close wild relatives of domestic horses – dwindled to nothing in the twentieth century. The last wild horse in Mongolia, belonging to another species, Equus przewalskii, was spotted in the 1960s. But then they were reintroduced, and now there are an estimated 300 living wild, with around 1,800 in captivity. In a curious twist of fate – and another unexpected and challenging example of the impact of human activity – it turns out that wild horses, along with moose, deer, boar and wolves, storks, swans and eagles, are doing very well in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. The positive impact of removing humans from this area seems to be overshadowing the negative effects of the radiation itself.
But – not all horses stayed wild, of course. You’ve probably never seen a wild horse, but I imagine you’ve seen plenty of domesticated ones. You may even have ridden one. Did it stand there, meekly, as you swung your leg up and slid into the saddle? Probably.
I wouldn’t describe Zorrita as meek, but she was perfectly happy for me to jump up on to her back. She didn’t try to throw me off, at any rate. Can you imagine what would have happened had I tried to mount that feral horse, that bagual? He would have had none of it – and neither would his wild predecessors. However much we marvel at humans having become close to wolves, which meant trusting that they wouldn’t use their strength and their terrifyingly sharp, slicing teeth on us, it’s surely just as astonishing to trust yourself to a large, fleet-footed mammal – one which could easily rear up, or career away, and throw you off, doing some very serious damage.
Breaking in
Imagine catching a wild horse – for the very first time. No one you know has ever done this before. And you bring it home, biting and kicking. You tie it up. You feed it. Your family thinks you’re mad. They want you to kill it – after all, it would feed everyone for weeks. But you want to keep this young, wild thing alive. You like it. And you have an idea. Everyone thinks you’re crazy.
You wait until the wild horse gets used to you approaching. You get closer and closer. She lets you stroke her mane, her neck. And then – you grab the mane, and fling yourself up on to her back. She’s not happy. She pulls at the rope you’ve tied to a post. She bucks to get you off her back. You lie down and hold her neck. You cling on. As she calms down, you sit back, releasing your grip around her neck. You hold tight to her mane instead.
After a few moments, while she’s snorting and stamping, but not trying to buck you off, you move one hand down the rope around her neck. And you gently loosen the knot. She knows. As the rope drops to the ground, she knows that she’s free. You – are just a distraction. She swings around, plunging her hooves into the wet ground, and RUNS. Hooves flying, you hear her breath in rhythm with the footfalls. You are clinging on for dear life. This is like flying and dying and being born and feeling one with the wind and the wildness and the landscape and the heavens. You hold on. The cadence of the gallop knocks the breath out of you as you bounce up and down on her back. She pulls steep turns, trying to knock you off. But you stay on. She runs and runs and runs. You’re very far from home.
At long last, she tires. Snorting and throwing back her head, spraying you with horse snot. She’s cantering now, her flanks and neck damp with sweat. Your hands are knotted into her mane. She trots, walks, stands still. You both stay still and breathe for a while. The gallop was exhausting, terrifying … exhilarating.
Then you sit up a little. Pull gently on her mane. You’d like her to turn around. She does. Now you’re facing in the direction you’d like to go. The camp is somewhere that way – along this valley, to the left of that hill. Can you ask her to take you back?
You shift your weight forwards a little. She responds by stepping forward. You stroke her mane. You shift forwards again, pressing into her flanks with your feet. She breaks into a trot. You’re trying not to grip her neck too tightly. If you can sit back a little, you can pull her mane to one side or the other – you can guide her. You’ve made an astonishing connection with a wild animal. You splash down into the river and up the opposite bank, round the flank of hill – and you can see the camp, the tents, and the smoke from the fires snaking up into the sky. What are they going to say when they see you riding in on this magnificent creature? You’ve captured her spirit – felt her power – in a way you’d never do by hunting and killing and eating her. The potential of horses has been unlocked. You feel like a god among people. And they’re running out to greet you – your sisters and brothers, your parents, your uncles, aunts, cousins and friends.
You’re almost at the camp. Your horse is slowing – she would usually stay away from humans. You urge her on. She’s yours now.
One of the camp dogs runs out and sniffs at her legs. She rears up. You try to cling on to her mane. She’s rearing then kicking back and flinging herself from side to side. You are thrown off, flying up and then landing on your back. It knocks the air out of you. You lie on the ground, gasping and gasping. You’re all right. A pain in your ribs will last a while but will heal and disappear. As you get your breath back, you bring up your left hand, against your chest. Fingers uncurl to reveal a clump of black, wiry horsehairs in your hand. You travelled with her. Now she’s gone, but you’ll always remember that wild ride.
After that, all your friends want to try. It becomes like a game. Who will dare to catch and ride a horse? It’s exhilarating foolishness. The stuff of youth. But before long, there’s a small group of you who not only ride horses, you keep them. Together, you become a force to be reckoned with. Headstrong youngsters – but a rising elite.
Years later, when you’re an elder of the tribe, and horses are all around, you’ll tell the story. Once they were all wild, these beasts that now seem like our allies. And you were the first person to try the unthinkable, to try riding a wild horse. You broke the spell. Even though you lost that first horse, even though you cracked your ribs as you hit the ground, people saw what was possible. Things have changed so much during your lifetime. Horses have brought so much – meat and milk, but also transport, trading and raiding, and connections across a wider landscape: you started to make contact with faraway people you’ve only heard about in stories. All those things that seemed impossible when you were a child are now part of everyday life, as if it’s always been this way. You would think nothing of travelling thirty, forty miles in a day to see your cousins. You’d think nothing of travelling that far to raid other camps and steal their copper and their animals.
Your children have grown up riding horses as if this was an entirely natural state of affairs. And now, just a couple of dec
ades after that first, exhilarating ride, it isn’t just your tribe that are horse people. The idea caught on like wildfire. You’ve given horses as gifts to three tribal leaders, securing their friendship and allegiance. As young women have left the tribe to marry into others, they’ve taken their horses with them. Across the steppe, the bond between people and horses has rippled out and taken hold. More wild horses have been caught and broken in, and every year new foals are born to tamed mares.
First steeds
No one really knows exactly how or why horses were first domesticated – but archaeology provides us with clues. The geography of horse domestication maps on to the steppe – where these grazing animals could continue to thrive even while much of Europe had become blanketed in forest. Up on the Great Eurasian Steppe, humans and horses had shared the landscape for tens of thousands of years. Around five and half thousand years ago, the relationship – which had previously been that of hunter and hunted – was set to change, and the fate of Equus caballus and the trajectory of human history would become deeply intertwined.
The ‘kitchen waste’ of archaeological sites is hugely informative. We can find out from this waste exactly what people were eating. In Mesolithic and Neolithic sites in Europe, horse bones typically make up just a small percentage of animal bones. But on the steppe, such archaeological sites contain plenty of horse bones – around 40 per cent. Humans living there depended on these animals – and would have been very familiar with them – long before they ever caught and tamed them.
Horse domestication comes much later than cattle domestication. And by 7,000 years ago, cattle herding had reached the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Foragers around the Dnieper River, running down to the northern coast of the Black Sea, were coming into contact with the farmers, who were spreading north and east, bringing their cattle, and also their pigs, sheep and goats with them.
Still, cattle herders could have carried on hunting wild horses rather than domesticating them. The anthropologist David Anthony has suggested that an icy climate could have been the driver. Cattle and sheep are fairly useless at digging through snow to get at forage, especially if that snow is crusted with ice. And they don’t tend to break ice to get to water, either. But horses use their hooves to do all of this. They are well-adapted creatures of the cold grasslands. Anthony suggests that a climatic downturn between 6,200 and 5,800 years ago could have seen herds of cattle struggling to make it through harsh winters – and perhaps this is what drove the cattle herders to catch the equine denizens of the steppe. Alternatively, it’s possible the domestication of horses emerged more naturally out of a horse-hunting culture. Maybe people who had been hunting horses for centuries, millennia – who understood them – started to catch and ride horses, in order to hunt other wild horses. But even that sounds too thoughtful, too strategic. Surely the first people who jumped up on to the backs of wild horses were teenagers, daring each other to do this unthinkable, foolish, brave thing.
In the early Neolithic, the people of north Kazakhstan were still mainly foragers, living in temporary camps. They hunted a variety of wild animals, from horses and short-horned bison to saiga antelope and red deer. But in the 1980s excavations at a site called Botai appeared to reveal a shift, happening around 5,700 years ago, to more specialised horse-hunting. At the same time, the people of the Botai culture, as it has become known, had also adopted a semi-sedentary lifestyle – they certainly don’t seem to have been nomads, following herds of wild horses. They were much more settled than that.
The vast majority of animal bones from Botai and similar sites dating to the fourth millennium BCE are all from horse. It’s clear that the Botai were eating a lot of horse meat. The evidence suggested that Botai people were not only able to trap entire herds of horses, they could also transport carcasses back home. This is a crucial piece of the puzzle: those horses were not killed and butchered in situ, like the horses at Wally’s Beach – they were brought back to the settlement. Archaeologists argued that the Botai must have been riding horses to hunt, and using horses as transport. But as more evidence emerged, the interpretation of the finds from Botai and related sites started to change. Amongst the archaeological remains at Botai sites, there are few spearheads, but plenty of what appear to be leather-working implements – bone tools showing characteristic patterns of microscopic wear. These clues suggest that the Botai were keeping horses – and riding them – not just hunting them. Archaeologists went further, probing the evidence, to test that suggestion.
Although there are only subtle differences in the shapes of bones between different equine species, and between wild and domestic horses, the metapodial or cannon bone, from the lower leg, has been shown to be a particularly informative part of the skeleton. So the archaeologists compared the shape of horse metapodials from Botai sites with those from other localities and periods. They found the Botai bones to be quite slender – and similar to those found at later sites, containing what were definitely domestic horses. They were also similar in their slenderness to metapodials from modern Mongolian horses.
Then they turned their attention to the teeth of the Botai horses, and found something quite extraordinary. They discovered a band of wear on the front edge of one premolar – the enamel of the tooth had worn right through, down to the dentine. If you’ve looked a horse in the mouth (it’s OK if it’s not a gift horse), you’ll have noticed that there’s a gap between its front teeth and its back teeth – it’s known as the ‘bars’ of the mouth, or the diastema. The only thing that could have caused this pattern of wear on the tooth was something which had been regularly placed in the bars of the mouth of that Botai horse – it had clearly worn a bit. Two other teeth showed more subtle signs of possible bit wear. The tooth with the very clear signs of wear was radiocarbon dated to 4,700 years ago. There were also bony growths on the surface of four other mandibles, in that gap between the teeth, just where the bit would sit in the horse’s mouth.
Finally, the archaeologists turned their attention to the pottery from Botai sites. They analysed the residues on the inner surface of sherds of cooking pots, and found evidence for not only horse fat but, in particular, lipids from horse milk. While hunters of wild horses would have undoubtedly tasted horse milk occasionally, when a lactating mare was killed, the milk on those cooking pots points to a more regular consumption. Far away from the centre of sheep, goat and cattle domestication and dairying in the Fertile Crescent, the people of the Eurasian Steppe independently came up with their own form of dairy farming. And it was a way of life, an economy, focused on horse meat and milk, that would continue for a very long time in Kazakhstan – right up to the present day. The herdsmen of the Altai Mountains are the inheritors of that ancient way of life, and fermented mares’ milk, in the form of kumis, is still a popular drink on the Eurasian Steppe.
This hat-trick of three separate strands of evidence – the leg bones, clear signs of bit wear, and use of mare’s milk – all point to the same thing. The Botai of ancient Kazakhstan were harnessing, milking and keeping domesticated horses by the fourth millennium BCE. But it doesn’t mark the start of something. It’s what archaeologists call a terminus ante quem – what it tells us is, by this point in time, domestication had happened.
The bit wear shows that the Botai horses were harnessed – bridles could have been used for driving them, but perhaps more likely, riding them. Beyond this specific evidence for keeping domesticated horses, the Botai culture itself goes back to 5,500 years ago. And it’s likely that horse-riding started even earlier than this. Burials in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe dating back to 6,500 years ago contain the skeletal remains of horses alongside bones of cattle and sheep. There’s clearly a symbolic association between these animals. It’s prompted archaeologists to suggest that horses may have been ridden this early, to herd the other animals.
Other clues turn up in the Danube Delta, in modern Romania and the Ukraine, with the appearance of horse-head stone maces and burial mounds, or kurgans – charac
teristic of steppe cultures – dating to 6,200 years ago. It strongly suggests that horse-riders from the steppe were moving south. Inside the kurgans, the dead were buried with necklaces of shell and tooth beads, as well as axes, twisted neck-rings and spiral bracelets made from a new material – that they’d acquired by trading with the people of the old European towns around the Danube – copper. They’d bought into the Aeneolithic, the Copper Age, and this shiny, malleable metal had become an emblem of prestige. This early expansion of steppe people may have carried something of its own, along with the horses: they may have been speaking a Proto-Indo-European language, a language which would evolve into Anatolian as they moved even further south.
So it seems likely that taming and riding horses could have started a thousand years before the Botai culture emerged – perhaps as early as the fifth millennium BCE. By the fourth millennium BCE – 5,500 to 5,000 years ago – horse bones were already becoming more frequent around the Caucasus, the mountainous region that stretches between the Black and Caspian Seas, south of the steppes. The same thing was happening in the Danube Delta, to the west of the Black Sea. By 5,000 years ago, the frequency of horse bones at some sites in central Germany had risen to account for 20 per cent of all animal bone. The connection is clear: horse-riding and domesticated horses were spreading – fast. Horses and horse-riding spread south of the Caucasus, too. After 5,300 years ago, horses are found more frequently in Mesopotamia – just as the Sumerian civilisation began to blossom.
Riding horses wouldn’t just have helped with horse husbandry – it would make herding other animals much more efficient as well. One person on foot, with a good dog to help, could herd 200 sheep. On horseback, with a dog, you could control 500 – and cover a much larger area. Expanding territories would surely have brought pastoralists into conflict with each other. Building alliances and gift-giving would have become important. The proliferation of copper and gold jewellery in the archaeological record suggests that people were seeking status and displaying wealth in a way they simply hadn’t before. But it all came at a cost: polished stone maces – some in the form of horses’ heads – also begin to turn up at this time. Riding and warfare seem to have been intimately linked, even at this early stage. Formal cavalry might not have emerged until the Iron Age, around 3,000 years ago, but mounted raids – stealing animals from other tribes – and the internecine strife that went with them probably go back to the very dawn of horseback riding.
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