The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History
432
The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History
432Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
Anthropologist and equestrian expert Susanna Forrest presents a singular, sweeping panorama of the animal’s prominent role across time and in societies around the world. Combining fascinating anthropological detail and incisive personal anecdotes, Forrest illustrates how our evolution has coincided with that of horses. She deftly synthesizes historical material with her experience in the field, traveling the globe to give us a diverse, comprehensive look at the horse in our lives today: from Mongolia where she observes the endangered takhi, to a show-horse performance at the Palace of Versailles and then to Arlington, Virginia, where veterans with PTSD are rehabilitated through interaction with horses.
Unique, passionate, and insightful, this book investigates the complexities of human and horse coexistence, brilliantly revealing the multifaceted ways our cultures were shaped by this powerful creature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802127976 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2018 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
EVOLUTION
An Onion Can Turn into a Lily
The history of the horse family is still one of the clearest and most convincing for showing that organisms really have evolved, for demonstrating that, so to speak, an onion can turn into a lily.
Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and through Sixty Million Years of History
by George Gaylord Simpson (1951)
Any beginning in nature is arbitrary. So let it be 56 million years ago, when Sifrhippus or 'zero horse' was a 12-lb runt browsing on fruits and low branches in the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, its back flat like a deer's, hind legs crouching. This is the onion that the palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson said would eventually morph into the lily which is Equus caballus. It had four toes balancing that puny weight on its feet (a fifth went unused), for stability on unsure ground. By its looks, it could have been a proto-camel, a proto-deer, a proto-tapir, a giraffe, a moose-to-be. A rabbit, as creationists have claimed. Give us another ten years and we will have found new fossils, and there will be a new name, a few million years skipped back and our notion of the earliest 'horse' will shapeshift once again, even as the bones of a still earlier proto-horse lie stony and undiscovered under a Wyoming cliff. But it will do as our onion that turns into a lily, although it is perfectly happy and functional as an onion.
The evolution that follows is not the smooth, Russian-doll progression of old-fashioned natural history museums and biology diagrams in which those extraneous toes are sloughed away, the neck lengthens and cannon bones elongate until – shazam! – the family Equidae is fit to meet its human master, but instead a daily effort to live in climates and landscapes that shift by the millions of years. These proto-horse onions are not working at progress, but survival and reproduction. They are, in our own terms, very successful – they survived longer by far than we have managed to be human.
They are not a single-file parade but a broad band of animals running swiftly towards us, flowing, changing, some dropping back or vanishing, others running on. They may lose one feature only to regain it later, or find that they have compromised themselves in one way to make another way of, say, feeding or running easier. They appear and disappear around the globe, coexisting with one another. They are numberless – new species are found in old swamps and dry basins all the time, and rearticulated with computer graphics or artists' impressions, given stripes and crested manes.
The tiny 'dawn horses' became extinct on the Eurasian continent during the Oligocene 23 million years ago, but in North America they prospered for stretches of time unimaginable to us, until America was overrun by grasslands, and the proto-horses that come to the fore – Mesohippus, Miohippus, Parahippus – developed high-crowned teeth that ran deep into their jaws, for grinding down the lignin and silica in the grass. Their heads were long so that they could graze with their eyes above the level of that vast expanse of herbage and see what was approaching them. They were perhaps twice the size of Sifrhippus and his fellow dawn horses, and growing. Two of the toes had gone, the central toe become larger, fusing bones to make a percussive instrument to beat against the firmer ground and propel the horse away from predators no longer impeded by forest foliage. The sugars in the grass caused inflammation in these stiffer feet, but the added speed and ready forage was worth it.
To either side of that hoof were smaller digits that still provided balance, but they would become vestigial nubs of tough, horny material behind the fetlock or inside the knee as Mesohippus and his peers fell back and the 'true horses' – Pliohippus, Dinohippus, Hippidion, Hipparion – took up the baton over slow millennia. The central, divot-like toe spread and rounded, and the joints above it lost much of their ability to rotate. These Equidae were the size of small ponies, with heavy jaws and profiles that tended towards convexity, like the faces of rams. They were almost lilies. The first hominin put in an appearance in the fossil record during their era.
Four million years ago, and a wavering distinction could be drawn between horse, donkey and zebra. Two and a half million years ago, and the early horses passed over the land bridge of grassland steppe from eastern America to western Eurasia, and began to have to deal with a new predator. On fossil zebra bones in Ethiopia slashing grooves appear, made, it seems, while some creature with a stone tool was removing as much flesh and sinew as possible – more than he could manage with his teeth.
Then, over 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus makes it out of Africa. Man has travelled at least as far as Schöningen in Germany 1.5 million years later, and he is hunting horses with spears. The cleaned bones of twenty Equus mosbachensis lie scattered by a lake shore, with the eight javelins of spruce and pine used to bring them down. At this time, there are horses all across the globe from the Americas to the Eurasian landmass. What they look like is unclear, but their bones indicate that they are still a tribe of multiple different species, albeit with frames that do not greatly differ from one another. There is no recognizable ancestor of the Shire horse or the Arabian, just small, swift, heavy-headed equines sought after as food by early men. They refuse to divide themselves into convenient wilder, smaller versions of the hothouse lilies we keep today, but they are becoming Equus caballus.
But with Homo sapiens comes a sudden flare of torchlight across Eurasia, and we can at last see what our horse looks like through human eyes: full-bellied and fine-legged, he flees across Lascaux cave walls, his dun sides shaded in with ochre and haematite and black hoofs marked in charcoal. At Niaux his leg joints have been accurately rendered by someone who has scraped them clean of flesh and sinew, and he has a shaggy beard and near smile on his pale muzzle. At Peche Merle he has a narrow black head and startling spots that dance across his sides and surround him. A side chamber at Lascaux reveals a small, fat, black and white horse running with duns and bays. You can hold them in your hand, too: mammoth ivory carved into an arched neck with notched crosses to indicate a mane; a lump of bright orange amber shaped into a horse with piggy eyes and ears pinned back; and on a fragment of bone, a wild-eyed, bristly Equus caballus is etched in detail down to the grooves along his nose and the irregular shape of his nostril. They are known, measured, sought.
Horses survived the extinctions that removed the woolly mammoths and rhinos, the short-faced bears, the sloths the size of oak trees, and the dire wolves and sabre-tooths that once pursued them, but in the Americas, as some of the grasslands gave way to forest and tundra, the horses began to shrink, and then, unable to cross the now-sunken land bridge, were hunted or simply dwindled away until there were none left on the continent somewhere in the eighth millennium BC. And then much of Europe also became more hostile to horses: they were hunted in greater numbers as more and more men appeared, and the continent began to be shaded over with woodland that ate up the grasslands for which they'd so slowly adapted.
Horses escaped south and west to Iberia, and east to the grasslands that reached from the Carpathians to Siberia. This landscape remained open but for scant forested areas, with an arid if harsh climate. Horse hoofs could find solid purchase on the dry ground. The animals could graze, keeping a watchful eye on their surroundings and to the far horizon, where the land became the sky. Here they began to grow larger than their poorer relations left behind in pockets of western and central Europe. What happened to the horses on the steppe would shape the future of Equus caballus and ensure both its extermination and its preservation.
CHAPTER 2DOMESTICATION
A Tooth, a Grave and Mare's Milk
When the Man and the Dog came back from hunting, the Man said, 'What is Wild Horse doing here?' And the Woman said, 'His name is not Wild Horse any more, but the First Servant, because he will carry us from place to place for always and always and always. Ride on his back when you go hunting.'
The Cat That Walked by Himself
by Rudyard Kipling in Just So Stories (1902)
The villages of the Botai culture lay east of the Urals in the Copper Age, by the banks of the Iman-Burluk river where the steppe was partly interthreaded with sparse forests of pine and birch. After a Stone Age of roaming hunter-gathering, the Botai had taken root in these roughly rectangular sunken houses with walls made from clay packed with quartz, and thatched-over wooden roofs. The houses stood in rows or gathered around shared spaces. There were over a hundred in one settlement alone.
What abundance of food made these people believe that permanence was better than the restless pursuit of game? They seldom fished or hunted for the local wild cattle or aurochs. They grew no grain or other crop. They had dogs that resembled modern Samoyed hounds, and some copperware, but their true economy was one of horsemeat, horse bones and horse milk: over 90 per cent of the bones found at their scattered sites were equine. The thatched roofs were insulated with horse dung. Horse jawbones were used to scrape leather thongs made from horsehide. Horse cannon bones were turned into hooked spear heads, and tendons used for thread. Ribs and shoulder blades shaped and smoothed the Botai's clay, round bottomed pots.
The hourglass-shaped short pastern bone, taken from just above the hoof, was stippled with dots, dashes and geometric patterns and left in caches in hollows under the houses – headless, feminine shapes that may be women in embroidered dresses. Only two Botai graves have been found, but one, which contains two men, a woman and a child, was scattered with the skulls and a few other bones of fourteen horses. Small pits contain equine skulls pared into masks or dishes, and slices of neck still on the vertebra left on altar-like stones.
Horsemeat protein was found in the Botai's pots. In the grasslands the meat and grease from equid joints provided fatty acids that men in a more diverse biosphere would have found in seeds and nuts. The pots yielded up something else, too: mare's milk, perhaps fermented into cheese, yoghurt or a mildly alcoholic, sour drink that made it easier to digest. It would have given the Botai the vitamin C they lacked, and more of those fatty acids. But how could the Botai have obtained mare's milk from wild horses?
Perhaps the rawhide thongs were used to make lassos or hobbles, and the area of earth in one village that is enriched by old horse dung and urine was a corral. Some of the horse skulls had been poleaxed – again, not an action that can be performed on a wild horse. They seem to have been butchered among the houses, which makes it hard to believe that wild horses could have been repeatedly driven in from the steppe by men on foot, or dragged as fresh kills by manpower alone. The butcher work was not especially thorough, suggesting that these were not hard-won meals stalked for days across the steppe, but acquired easily and processed rapidly.
The vertebrae of the Botai horses do not show any obvious signs of riding, but some believe that their teeth are worn by horsehair, leather or bone bits. The Botai may have ridden them in order to hunt local wild horses with those spears made from cannon bones, or used them to haul wild horse carcasses back to the village. Perhaps their dogs were enough to herd the wild horses. But these Copper Age Kazakhs were the earliest proven horsekeepers, and at the time they were making their horse leather and smoothing their pots, large horses began to head back east towards Europe again, and in the grasslands around them, more horse-centric peoples appear.
These horses also developed new coat colours unrecorded on Stone Age cave walls: horses that were bay, black, dun or spotted like snow leopards were now joined by chestnuts, smokey blacks, horses with cloud-like white sabino roaning, or dark bodies with pale manes – the negative of those Lascaux horses. The gene that made cream, blue-eyed horses or turned chestnut into palomino and bay into buckskin appeared. More mares were captured or lured in from the wild to add to the lineages. Horses began to alter in muscle and bone, and in their heart anatomy but also their mentality, which became more tolerant of humans, more able to learn and less fearful.
As the Copper Age hardened into the Bronze, sheep and cattle bones took the place of horses' in the middens, and horses were now placed in the graves of warriors and the wealthy. The horse people began to cover greater distances, either on the backs of their horses or with wagons drawn by them or oxen. They took with them languages, religious ideas, inventions and goods they had acquired or traded from both the Far East and the West. Most of all, they took horses.
CHAPTER 3WILDNESS
A Swift and Savage Breed
The bones of one's horse are not to be discarded in a foreign land.
Mongolian saying
I
It's a thousand miles as the crow flies from the open steppe of Askania-Nova north of the Crimea to Berlin. In the summer of 1942, the dirt roads were dry and dusty but passable, and German troops, guns and horses flowed east and south, heading across the grasslands north of the Black Sea towards the Don River and onwards to Stalingrad.
Nearly 750,000 horses had been moved to the Eastern Front to haul the artillery of Operation Barbarossa, and by that summer, a third of them were dead or useless. Farm horses were requisitioned from Germany, from Poland and all the new Lebensraum the Wehrmacht had passed over on its way to the steppe. Up to 4,000 horses a week were taken from Poland alone for the Western Front. That summer, hundreds of thousands of horses flowed from the new, expanding heartlands of Greater Germany towards its raw edges. But two went the other way – not because they were being given temporary care or respite behind the lines, but because they were being taken back to the very centre of Nazi Germany, Berlin.
The dun stallion and mare were small, the size of ponies. They were not broken to harness nor to saddle. Unlike the Lipizzaner horses that the Nazis were also transferring from Piber in Austria to Czechoslovakia, they were not highly trained or even trained at all. It would have taken days to drive them in off the steppe of the Askania-Nova estate, where they grazed with five herdmates. They were probably packed into wooden crates for their train ride rather than standing in a wagon with six others like the farm horses off to the front, so that when they kicked and fought, they would not harm each other or fall badly. Scared, they battered against the boards with their heels, calling to one another. They would be the last of their herd to leave Askania-Nova, and the horses they left behind would not survive the war.
When the Germans had arrived in Askania-Nova on the heels of the retreating Red Army in September 1941, they had found the threshed wheat on fire in the fields, the farm machinery wrecked and the buildings tumbledown. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein set up his headquarters there, ordering his men to check for booby traps and take an inventory of the contents of the estate. They had counted the seven dun horses, and duly notified Berlin.
But why were these wild horses so important that they were allocated the resources and the manpower needed to get them back to Germany, and at whose command did they travel? What did the Nazis want with wild horses, and why were any on a GermanRussian estate famous for its sheep herds in the first place? The story of the wild horse begins when it came into being – at the creation of the domestic horse.
II
When the Botai took a lasso to the horse, there were still wild horses that continued to evade, or resist, domestication. More mares were captured from different wild herds and brought into the corrals, but few stallions after the first one were pressed into service. As the human population grew and began to disperse and settle in the wild horses' grazing lands and by their watering holes, the horses slipped away from the flocks and the crops, heading for the deep steppe or desert in the east, or into the forests and mountains of Europe in the west. As decades and then centuries of domestication took effect, the species split into two: the useful source of meat, milk, skins and transportation – a man's wealth – and the wild remnant, arduous to hunt, a competitor for resources and territory.
The role of wild horses in the human record is, for a long time, minimal, both because they were elusive and because they were not a plentiful enough food source to meet man's interest. Sometimes domestic horses escaped and became feral, even for generations, but they were not the true wild horse, which was identifiable not just by its appearance but also by its almost telepathic alertness – it wanted to stay wild, and it must have been this temperament that meant it was not tamed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Age of the Horse"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Susanna Forrest.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations ix
Introduction 3
Evolution - An Onion Can Turn into a Lily 7
Domestication - A Tooth, a Grave and Mare's Milk 13
Wildness - A Swift and Savage Breed 19
Culture - Horses Strangely Wise 81
Power - Hay is Biofuel 149
Meat - Americans Don't Eat Horses 211
Wealth - Knight Dreams and Heavenly Horses 255
War - Are Horses Warriors? 309
Afterword 369
Acknowledgements 371
Bibliography 373
Index 401