Posted on 03/08/2020 9:44:13 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
In the increasingly urbanized world, few people still ride horses for reasons beyond sport or leisure.
However, on horseback, people, goods and ideas moved across vast distances, shaping the power structures and social systems of the premechanized era. From the trade routes of the Silk Road or the great Mongol Empire to the equestrian nations of the American Great Plains, horses were the engines of the ancient world.
Where, when and how did humans first domesticate horses?
Tracing the origins of horse domestication in the prehistoric era has proven to be an exceedingly difficult task. Horses -- and the people who care for them -- tend to live in remote, dry or cold grassland regions, moving often and leaving only ephemeral marks in the archaeological record. In the steppes, pampas and plains of the world, historic records are often ambiguous or absent, archaeological sites are poorly investigated and research is published in a variety languages.
At the heart of the issue is a more basic struggle: How can you distinguish a "domestic" animal from its wild cousin? What does it even mean to be "domesticated"? And can scientists trace this process in archaeological sites that are thousands of years old and often consist of nothing more than piles of discarded bones?
(Excerpt) Read more at heritagedaily.com ...
I believe that children domesticated horses. Adults kept horses for food and kept telling the kids not to play with their food, but kids kept climbing on horses anyway. And kids love what runs like the wind. :)
“new tech could help archaeologists figure out where and when”
Why do we need to know? They’re horses, for Pete’s sake, and are domesticated. Good. Aren’t there more important issues these people could be working on?
Reminds me of the TV shows on Discovery, etc., where highly degree-ed adults seriously discuss how aliens flew down and impregnated the humans and created current DNA. They sound like Skinny Pete and Badger concocting their plots for Star Trek.
No one has a gun to your head to click the link and read it.
I didn’t read it. I clicked the link to reply.
to the equestrian nations of the American Great Plains, horses were the engines of the ancient world.
The “equestrian nations of the American Great Plains” were a relatively recent and short-lived by-product of European settlers, who introduced horses to North America.
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I was going to point out the same thing. The horse was introduced to the Americas by the Europeans. The horses the native Americans rode were descendants of those that escaped from settlers, formed wild herds after they’d begun to lose their domesticated characteristics. With rare exceptions. Nothing ‘ancient’ about them.
Kinda like all the research that’s trying to find when and how dogs adopted all of us humans.
Not a bad pursuit in the realm of knowledge, but less important when Americans are still legitimately struggling day to day.
BTW: Although the article is general, it is authored by a prof from my alma mater, so the US is somehow involved, I suspect.
Eat ‘em first, milk ‘em, next, then ride ‘em.
Then spread your language and culture.
Just a matter of when.
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