Early Riders, again
I struggled with the story of early horse domestication in Raiders. The research, going for about a decade, resembled a volley between Alcaraz and Sinner. My head spun following the back and forth between proponents and opponents of Botai in Kazakhstan as the site of the first domesticated horses. Moreover the arguments for earlier domestication made plausible the idea that the steppe people whom archeologists refer to as Yamnaya (from a site in Russia), invaded Europe with horses in the 4th millennium BCE. I never liked this story, which underlines a lot of ideologically heavy views of European history (e.g., Gimbutas). In recent years scholars working with aDNA (ancient DNA) have significantly clarified the chronology of horse domestication. Based on this work, I am trying to pull trying to pull together a simple narrative, even though we can no longer speak about domestication, but domestications.
As the ice age receded and steppe turned to forest (12,000 years ago), the population of horses declined. The relationship between horses and humans began to change, as humans began to “harvest” nearby herds for meat (similarly to the way Plains Indians managed the buffalo herds). Horses chose to live in proximity to human settlements, where campfires drove off biting insects and scared away feline predators. Around 5,500 years ago humans began to milk horses, in the same manner as they had milked cattle, goats and sheep, millennia earlier.
From the moment humans began to managing horse herds, the necessity of riding them arose, simply because horses move faster than cattle and humans. We simply can’t imagine a herder following the herd on foot. So people began to ride. Probably children or youngsters, changing their mounts from time to time, because these horses were not strong enough to support a rider for any period of time. As I mentioned in Raiders, the fact that these horses had lived close to human settlements for some time, that the mares had been milked by humans, and the foals raised with humans, enabled the first intrepid riders to stay on top of these somewhat less unpredictable animals (but what modern horse is predictable?)
At this time, five or six races of horses grazed between between Spain in the west and the Altai in the east. What I call them races represented clusters of somewhat homogenous DNA, neighboring races overlapping. The horses in Iberia were quite different from the ones in Poland, the ones in Poland from the ones in the steppe, not so much.
Extensive traces of one of these races has surfaced in Botai. There we have significant evidence of domestication: short generation gaps (because domesticated horses breed earlier than wild ones), skeletal and dental deformities due to being bitted and ridden, mares milk proteins in the excavated ceramics. However, the latest aDNA studies suggest that the Botai horses are not the ancestors of the modern horse, but of the wild Przewalski horse. This surprising conclusion suggests that 1) the Botai breeding experiment was ultimately unsuccessful, and 2) someone else came up with a better alternative.
Indeed 4,000 years ago, a millennium after the Botai horse, breeders in Pontic-Caspian steppe developed a race of horses with two genetic modification for better riding. One supported stronger spines and the other lowered the animal’s stress. This meant these horses could be ridden further, longer, and with more predictable behavior. Scholars refer to this new breed as the second domestication, or Dom2 for short.
The superior riding features of the Dom2 were so apparent, that within a short period of time it superseded all other races of horses for domestic use. Within 200 years we find hardly any other races being managed. The other races either remained wild, became feral like the Botai, or died out. Perhaps the Tarpans, a race that went extinct in the 19th century, descended from these, with or without an admixture of Dom2.
The success of the Dom2 in a short period of time suggests that people knew what a good horse looked like. They already rode their local races of horses for herding purposes, so adopting the Dom2 was an easy decision for them. We can imagine the first horse traders fanning out across Europe and bringing the new, improved horses to eager buyers further west.
The Dom2 enabled real riding and chariot driving. The arrival of the Dom2 coincided with the warrior culture of the Bronze age. Suddenly you have the ritualized violence of the Iliad and the Mahabharata with the clash of charioteers, spears and arrows. The first such battle attested in Europe is at Tollense in northern Germany, probably involved 4,000 combatants as well as horses, about 3,300 years ago.
So note here, it was not the Yamnaya peoples from the steppe who brought warfare to Europe. They brought us milk, cheese and ensured that many Europeans would be lactose tolerant, if they have sufficient Yamnaya DNA. They probably did have horses, but these would have been the ones more dangerous to their riders than to their neighbors.
Is there then a connection between the Dom2 and warfare? The pre-Bronze age, pre-Dom2 horse herders of Europe did not leave behind them signs of organized violence. That makes sense because their horses were not strong enough to pull chariots or steely enough to engage in battle. So Dom2 horses indirectly enabled the kind of carnage Homer describes in the Iliad (about 3,100 years ago): “ As through deep glens rageth fierce fire on some parched mountain-side, and the deep forest burneth, and the wind driving it whirleth every way the flame, so raged he every way with his spear, as it had been a god, pressing hard on the men he slew; and the black earth ran with blood…. thus beneath great-hearted Achilles his whole-hooved horses trampled corpses and shields together; and with blood all the axletree below was sprinkled and the rims that ran around the car, for blood-drops from the horses' hooves splashed them, and blood-drops from the tires of the wheels.”