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Horses may have been domesticated twice

113 points by diodorus

by Jeff_Brown

4 subcomments

It all seems so unfathomable to me. Even plants! Wild almonds will kill you with cyanide. Even domesticated horses are scary as hell -- what would they have been like before that? Domestic goats can kill big men -- my uncle (huge, muscly, outdoorsy blue collar guy) almost got rammed to death by one.
The only instance of donestication I really get are cats.

by aksss

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There is a great book called "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" by David Anthony, and in Chapter 10 he goes into some depth about horse domestication.
https://archive.org/details/horsewheelandlanguage/page/192/m...
I suppose as it relates to this article, the author points out that:
1) "Earliest evidence for possible horse domestication...appeared after 4800 BCE". This evidence comes mostly from cultural artifacts representing the horse, I believe.
2) Looking for physical evidence of domestication is very difficult, but two methods of debatable applicability to horses - size variability and age at death - seems to indicate 2800 BCE and more recent than 3000 BCE, respectively.
3) Evidence of bit wear in teeth provides evidence of horse-riding, which is assumed to post-date horse domestication. Bit wear is evident in teeth whether hard (metal) or soft (leather, hair) bits are used. That evidence pretty conclusively indicates that horse-riding goes back at least until 3700-3500BCE. Domestication of horses (herding) is presumed to predate this by at least another 500 years.
4) To the topic of riding coming after domestication: "What was the incentive to tame wild horses if people already had cattle and sheep? Was it for transportation? Almost certainly not. Horses were large, powerful, aggressive animals, more inclined to flee or fight than to carry a human. Riding probably developed only after horses were already familiar as domesticated animals that could be controlled. The initial incentive probably was the desire for a cheap source of winter meat." The author points out that unlike cattle, horses are able to forage in the winter on their own, making them extremely valuable as livestock for primary and secondary products.
Point 4 is in opposition to this article, and demonstrates the idea championed by the article (horses domesticated for speedy human transport) is not new, per se, but since this article post-dates the book, it should be read as perhaps bringing new evidence to the table for that theory.

by Log_out_

1 subcomments

Another interesting tidbit, cows may have domesticated themselves. We can see here in Europe where the wulfes are returning a phenomenon, were deer starts to hug civilization, to have one predator (us) scare away another. Deer self domesticated long enough may as we'll be called cows.

by stareatgoats

4 subcomments

The rapid expansion of the Yamnaya across much of the Eurasian continent in the millennia leading up to the historic era is still not fully understood, or has at least not reached consensus. If horses were not the reason, what then? The reasons are probably several, but the evidence is mounting that the causes were primarily cultural: a warring people with conquest engrained in their cultural DNA, a glimpse of which we still have in the cultural practices and documented beliefs of the Vikings, among other Indo-European peoples. Incidentally, they were largely the "race" that the Nazis identified with as the "master race" which has probably complicated this type of research to some extent.

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by jojobas

2 subcomments

I wonder what alternative history paths were there if the Clovis people figured out how to domesticate the horse in North America. Too bad they had other plans.

by teruakohatu

8 subcomments

I know nothing about horses, but I have always wondered how domesticated they are. It seems they are quite happy to live in the wild and require a fair bit of breaking in.
Compared to sheep, cattle and dogs, they seem more on the wild side of spectrum than other domestic animals.

by hoseja

1 subcomments

>For instance, ancient people from southwest Asia known as the Yamnaya...
They really hate saying it, don't they.

by randomtoast

3 subcomments

The domestication of horses was not a single event, but a long, drawn-out process that took place over several thousand years. According to Occam's razor, it is very unlikely that it happened twice in history. I do not question the stated DNA method, but I do question the conclusion drawn here. There might be a link between the two domestications (if two or more have actually occurred) that hasn't been discovered yet.

by j0hngalt

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[dead]

by complianceowl

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[flagged]

by agnosticmantis

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I’m guessing it was the second attempt that really stuck.