Discover in a free daily email today's famous history and birthdays Enjoy the Famous Daily. Search the whole site. List of subjects Sources Feedback. Humans acquire their most important single ally from the animal kingdom when they domesticate the horse, in about BC. Wild horses of various kinds have spread throughout most of the world by the time human history begins.
Their bones feature among the remains of early human meals, and they appear in cave paintings with other animals of the chase. Some of their earliest fossil remains have been found in America, but after arriving across the Bering Land Bridge they become extinct in that continent. They are reintroduced by European colonists in the 16th century. A natural habitat of the wild horse is the steppes of central Asia. Here, with its ability to move fast and far, it can gallop out of harm's way and make the most of scarce grazing.
And here, some years ago, humans first capture, tame and breed the horse. The original purpose, as with cattle, is to acquire a reliable source of meat and subsequently milk. But then, in a crucial development, tribesmen discover that they have at their disposal a means of transport. With a horse beneath him, man's ability to move is improved out of all recognition.
The next comparable moment in the story of human speed does not arrive for another years - with steam trains. The first domesticated horses are of a size which we would describe as ponies.
Horses of this kind were still living in the wild in Mongolia until quite recent times. 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. 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.
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? As an archaeozoologist, I work in a field that seeks to develop ways to do just this — and with the aid of new technologies, recent research is turning up some surprising answers.
Analyzing horse bones from archaeological sites across Eurasia, 20th-century scholars argued over whether changes in the size and shape of horse bones might reflect the impacts of human control. They debated whether management of a domestic herd would leave recognizable patterns in the ages and sex of horses in the archaeological record.
Without agreed-upon criteria for how to recognize horse domestication in the archaeological record, a staggering range of different ideas emerged. In nearly every corner of the world with grassland ecosystems and wild horses, various researchers hypothesized domestication began in Anatolia, Iberia, China and even North America.
Some more outlandish models suggested an origin for horse domestication as far back as the last Ice Age , about 20, years ago. But on the steppe of what is today Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, Equus caballus , the species to which modern horses belong, continued to thrive in large numbers.
Sometime after B. There is also evidence that riding horses soon followed domestication. Anthony and his colleague Dorcas Brown have analyzed horse teeth dating to around B.
It not only made it much easier to manage livestock, but would also have allowed for maintaining larger herds. Meet the people trying to help. Animals Whales eat three times more than previously thought.
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