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Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning.
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All right, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and as sometimes, I am doing a monolog today, no guests, just me, and I will be talking about the domesticated horse. But yes, before I move on, I do want to encourage everybody, if you're a free subscriber, in particular, I encourage everybody to rate and review this podcast. Please on Apple and Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube. I will be, you posting stuff ungated. There other monologs that will not post ungated. Keep those gated because there's no guest. But you know, most of the content is eventually free. That is the podcast, so just please rate and review. Don't really pester people too much about that. But it would just be great to get it out there to more people and have a little organic growth. We've plateaued somewhat, I would say, and so it’d be just great to have some better metrics so that the platforms are distributed more. I think the content here is unique, interesting, and I don't think we are at the limits of our audience, obviously. So today, I will be talking about the horse. As I said, it's a big deal. There's a couple of books out that actually just just came out, that are very similar. One is “The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity” by Timothy C Winegard. This guy's a historian, and he really, really brings together a lot of secondary literature to create a pretty broad narrative. The other book is “Hoof Beats: How Horses Shape Human History” So, very, very similar Topics, Titles, they came out about the same time. I think this is something that happens periodically in publishing. I don't know why, but two books with very similar titles come out at the same time. Actually, this happened with religion, I think in 2004 with Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran who are cognitive anthropologists that wrote books on religion, “Religion Explained and a god's we trust, came out about the same time. They even came out of the same tradition in anthropology. So that was weird. But any case, the author here is William Taylor for “Hoof Beats” He is a curator of archeology at the University of Colorado. So unlike Winegard this is actually a scholar who has worked for the archeology of horses, so there's a little bit more detail on those particular topics and a little less survey of the secondary literature. So they're really, really good compliments. I would recommend them. So yeah, why do I want to talk about the horse? I think because I think most of you know, most of you are aware, horses are very important. You know dog the dogs. Dogs are man's best friend. Obviously, they have been domesticated or CO associated with our species in some form for at least 20,000 years. I suspect it's probably earlier that to be honest. But in any case, they are the our only place to see domesticate. So they were domesticated during the Ice Age before 11,700 years ago, they arrived in the new world with the Amerindians, with the Native American peoples. You know, when they crossed over the Bering seas, the Bering Land Bridge, etc, etc. In contrast, other species were domesticated later during the Holocene, after the Ice Age, and the horse is one of those. In fact, the horse is a later domesticate. And I will get a little bit into that, but I think we should probably jump back a little bit, and this is actually where Winegard’s more natural history narrative gets really deep in terms of the evolutionary context for the origin of the horse. And yeah, so the horse is obviously an important animal for us in terms of economically, in terms of military, just in terms of everything that is done for us really, really deep into the 20th century, I will tell you guys. I was looking at the data, the number of horses in the United States peaked in the United States in 1920 and it declined very, very gradually up until after World War Two, when it kind of declined a bit more precipitously. There's still a couple of million horses, domestic horses, in the United States, you know, even aside from the feral ones. But in any case, so this is a very important animal for us for economic production, for military for transport. It was revolution in many ways, but this is all the outcome of a bunch of evolutionary coincidences, evolutionary adaptations that made the horse appropriate to be domesticated. So obviously donkeys and the wild ass have also been domesticated. Those are equids, but the Zebra has not been domesticated, and they have attempted to domesticate the zebra. The long and the short of it is that the Zebra has very, very nasty attitude. Zebras are really, really bad about biting people. Apparently, they bite zookeepers way more, for example, than big cats, who are more obedient, more tameable. Zebras also are almost impossible to lasso, like they avoid being lassoed that way. So there have been attempts to domesticate zebras multiple times in Africa because they're resistant to African diseases. So in some ways, it would be better than having to have horses who are a little bit more vulnerable. They're Eurasian steppe creatures and don’t have the same adaptations for the tropics. But zebras are not domestic. Well, the horse is, in some ways, in most ways, it is actually superior to the ass and the donkey. The donkey was domesticated Egypt. The wild ass was domesticated Asia, West Asia, the Middle East. They're very similar. There are hybrids between the two, the wild ass, a little bit bigger, a little bit faster. I will tell you, as someone who Long, long ago, when I was in high school, I worked on a mule farm. And horses are big, donkeys are small. So why do we still have donkeys? Well, donkeys are actually pretty smart. They're very robust, and obviously, you know, coming out of the arid lands of Middle East, they can't tolerate heat and aridity a little bit more. They don't need as much feeding. You know, they don't need feed. They don't need as much forage, and they don't need to be fed as much. So there are some roles for donkeys. But, you know, once the horse was domesticated, after the donkey had showed up in the Middle East, after 2000 BC, it pretty much replaced the donkey and the wild ass in most higher end tasks, is what I would say. So it's really well adapted for what we needed for. So what does that mean? Most of you know that the early horse, the dawn horse, or whatever, eohippus, is this tiny, little creature. I think it's also called Hyracotherium or eohippus is the genus. In any case, these are little North American browsers. They look like horses, but really, I think they're more like a tapir. They're tiny. And for a long time, horses were were browsers like in forest and whatnot. Obviously, the ancestors and horses, right? Obviously, they are not today. And so what happened was
grasses began to spread all over the world. So we, we take this for granted, grasslands. But actually, you know, grasses are relatively new, evolutionary, you know, evolutionarily relatively new. I think you guys know that angiosperms are also evolutionarily new. Angiosperms are like flower plants, they date to the end of the age of the dinosaurs in terms of how they're how they spread. And grasses actually, really date to the last 25 million years or so, so in the Miocene, which is the age of mammals, dinosaurs disappear around like 61-62 million years ago. Grasses actually date to the end of the Miocene, and they are correlated with a with at the middle of the Miocene, but they are correlated with a drying, cooling climate, and so then grasses spread right. Grasslands start showing up all over the place, and you know, they do really well, as you know, but they transform ecosystems, and they are very particular. A very particular plant that if you've ever tried to eat grass as a kid, put it in your mouth, you know that grasses are hard. They're tough. So you know, when humans make salads, they don't make grasses because grasses they don't put grasses in there because grasses are not succulent. They have silica in them. They're tough Winegard, the author, the historian. I'll just call the historian as opposed to the archeologist. So “The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity” is written by the historian Winegard, and “Hoof Beats” is written by the archeologist, Taylor. Okay, so I'm gonna refer to them that way. The historian talks about basically how eating grass and living on grass is like living on sandpaper. So that's really, really unpleasant. So there's two issues I think to consider here. Sandpaper is tough, so your teeth get worn down. Obviously, you know, human teeth get worn down, but a lot of times our teeth get worn down for reasons that are, you know, not optimal in terms of what we're doing and what we're eating. So, for example, Ancient Egyptians had worn down teeth. A lot of ancient people had worn down teeth because there was, like, grit in their bread and whatever they were eating because, you know, milling, grinding down the seed produced that grit as side effect, and it was slowly wore down your teeth. Women in particular, would chew on leather and so to soften it up, or whatever Neanderthals probably did too, that would eventually wear down the teeth over the decades, so that, you know, eventually just have, just have gums, and we have, we have pretty, pretty short teeth, because, you know, we're omnivores, and we don't, we don't eat tough things like grass. Also, we tend to process our food with with fire. And as you guys know, fire makes things that are tough much more palatable, much easier to digest, much easier to chew. So in general, I mean, honestly, I would say well done meat is not as easy to chew as medium rare. But you know, most of the time you're not getting you're not getting such like high quality marbled meat in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. So, you know, we cook things to make it more palatable. Horses don't have that luxury and they're eating sandpaper. So first of all, their teeth are extremely long. So they have two sets of long teeth. And you know the, you know the teeth you see eventually start to recede, and you see like these huge, huge, long teeth. So apparently the term long in the tooth is from horses. When old horses, you can see they're very, very long teeth, so they don't wear out very fast at all, if the horse survives to a very, very ripe old age, which apparently probably was rare in the evolutionary environment that it was adopted. Now the teeth do eventually wear down. And unlike, you know, lizards or sharks or whatever, they don't, we don't keep growing teeth. Uh, mammals don't keep our teeth. We have specialized teeth, and the horse, just like a human, will have gums and will starve to death, right? So old horses will starve to death if they don't have their teeth. Obviously, modern horses today, sometimes they'll be out to pasture, but we also feed them corn and grain and other things. So I'm assuming that the same problem does not apply, but this is what life was like in the wild. So these grasslands are spreading all across Eurasia. Ice Age obviously starts only a couple million years ago, but even before that, the world starts to get cooler and drier, and so these small little browsers start to diversify, and they go out into these broad open grasslands. So that results in, okay, the teeth get really long. Also the teeth change. So our teeth have enamel on the cover. I think they have, horses have an extra layer of things called Denton, if I remember correctly or no, I think we have Denton and enamel, but they have an extra layer on their teeth that makes it even more robust. So they're adapting. Obviously, you know, horses have big teeth. It's a joke to have a horsey smile. So they have big teeth. They have, like, some molars in the back and then some teeth in the front. And they also have a gap in the middle of their long muscle, and that gap is where later the bit will go in for the reins and whatnot. So, you know, horses will eventually when they're domesticated, there's all sorts of horse gear associated with some of it's around the head that allows you to control so you pull the reins, you chop it at the bit. They have a bit in there that goes into their mouth, and that bit goes right into that gap. That gap emerged basically as a horse's muzzle got longer, and so that was that was very, very convenient for control. If they didn't have that we not yet, might not be able to control them, right? So why did their muscle get longer? Okay, so they're out on the grassland, and horses seem to target very, very low quality feed, really dry, shorter steppe, rather pull the longer moisture steppe. So the rumors the horses are not ruminants, as you guys know, they are. They're odd toed ungulates, along with, I think, pigs, they're not ruminants, though they don't have ruminant digestion, so they are not as efficient in some ways,
in digesting the grasses, but they digest faster, so they have a cecum, which is a bacterial pouch of the back of Their stomach, and basically to consume this low quality forage, they have to eat all the time. So they're out there on the step, and they're always eating and their head is down. So when your head is down and you are a herbivore, you are notionally a prey animal. You want to see what's going on all around you. Okay, so what happened is the horse's eyes are positioned at the top of their head. They're huge. They're on the side of the head. So the horse is in the in the grassland. You see this like in paintings and photographs wherever nature documentaries, head is down. Its muzzle is reaching towards just low grass. So that's why it has a long muzzle, and that's why it has the, you know, this gap evolve between the front teeth and the back teeth. The teeth become extremely robust and large, very long. And the horses eyes are high, so can see around for predators all the time. The horse's muzzle is very long. So it's so long that basically the horse can stick the head down, eat while it's looking around, drink water while it's looking around, while it's standing all the time. Now it is not true that horses, that the horse, never sits down. It does periodically. But one other thing unique to the horse lineage equids is apparently some of the bones their forearms or not the forearms, because they're not forearms, but some of their bones in their limbs fused in a way that's not typical for mammals. So we can rotate our arms and our legs in certain ways that a horse cannot, because the bones fuse. And so what happened, basically, is the horse has these fused bones that allow it mostly to go, most easily forwarded backward, which means that the horse obviously is good at running. You know, this is like an adaptation for velocity. It also is more energetically efficient. The bones when in a standing position lock in a particular way. So the horse does sit down, it does lay down, but it actually is about 10% more energetically efficient standing up. So it stands up way more than cattle, other ruminants, other ungulates do. So the horse is evolved to be on the steppe. It has an extremely long muscle, and it can survive a low quality foliage or forage. And the muzzle has a gap in the teeth that is optimal, obviously, for the bit. In terms of its anatomy, it's a standing anatomy that goes forward and backward extremely fast. So this is like a fast conveyance. And also, unlike the wild ass or the donkey, the back of the horse, it doesn't, when the horse gallops or trots or, you know, moves, it doesn't bounce up and down. It's actually relatively stiff. Obviously the spine goes down, but there are actually some configurations of its whole body plan that are optimal for the for where the saddle would be and sitting in the middle. So with the donkey, you kind of have to sit at the back because its spine is too weak. The horse's spine is strong, but it also has like these shoulders that are well developed up in the front and in the back. It's rear, it’s haunch, is stable when it's moving, so that means you're not bouncing up and down, which is obviously optimal for later riding. Now, it is a very nervous animal. No, but you know, and that would, you know, there's, there's some issues with that. The horse, unlike most herbivore mammals, has no horns. So male horses defend themselves by kicking with the front teeth and biting female horses usually with with the back limbs and with the back feet. You know, the hide limbs. But mostly they run, and they run fast. So they can gallop, I think, like 45 miles per hour for long periods of time. In contrast with other mammals like the cheetah, can go way faster, but only in bursts. Horse are extremely efficient and effective runners. They're very strong. And, you know, Donkey also cannot do this. So most of the other equids are not as efficient as the Eurasian horse or the - I will say, because the horse are originally from North America. I did, I did leave that out. The horse are originally from North America, and they spread into Eurasia during the Ice Age over the Bering Strait. So the horse evolved mostly in North America, and eventually they became extinct in North America, depending on, you know, between 7000 and 5000 years ago, probably in the Yukon latest. But you know, they're relative newcomers to Eurasia. One thing I do want to mention is that their size also has to do with their ecology. So the largest, the largest, the large size of the horse probably has to do with the fact that it is a herbivore, consuming low quality foliage in in the wild, in the wild grasslands, right? So if it was small, it's obviously vulnerable. So being bigger helps with predators during the Ice Age, because you have to think of it as an Ice Age animal. And just to be clear, with the evolution, you know the genus Equus, the current genus Equus, like Equus callabus, I think, is the horse. So they evolved only within the last five to two and a half million years, and they show up in Eurasia from North America around, like 900,000- 800,000 years ago into Eurasia. So in any case, you know, they're relatively new in Eurasia, as far as that goes. And there's a bunch of different horse species, which we'll talk a little about, bit about later. But in any case, they're big because the bigger animals are more metabolically efficient, and so if you're eating low quality forage all the time, like a horse, being big is just better, because you don't need as many calories per unit of mass you have. Obviously, like a shrew is the extreme example. It needs to eat all the time to survive. So a small horse would need to eat more food, and the food quality is pretty low for the horse, and so it would be bigger. And obviously the bigness helps. The original domestic horses were a little too small, probably to ride comfortably or robustly. Today we have Clydesdales. We have massive breeds, but part of the domestication of the horse that would occur later was a matter of scaling up the size. First to like hitch to chariots, and eventually to ride. And then some of the horses, obviously, would become war horses with, like, a lot of armor, or Clydesdales. Others would, you know, there'd be smaller ponies, whatnot. There's a ride range of of size. So you got these big animals, and, you know, they have some anatomical features that would make them amenable for like, say like having a saddle. They're strong, they're fast, they can last. I think I read like, they can go about a month without food and six days without water. Probably not optimal but they could do that. And then, yeah, another behavior is, is notable. They are herd animals. They tend to follow stallions on the stallions lead from behind. So there are a bunch of mares from stallions, and then there are stallion groups. There are males that are too young or too old to be leading a herd. So the herd aspect is important for domestic kids. And I think most of you will anticipate this. We, in a way, are leading their herd. We are the stallions. Humans became the stallions, in a way, for the domestic horse. So it's big, which means it was going to later be useful in war and like economics, like on the farm and agriculture, it doesn't have horns, so in that way it's a little less dangerous than other animals. Like it's not going to gore you. Tends to be a more of a flight than fight animal.
It can live off a low quality forage, and it has herd dynamics that we can co opt. A low quality forage is interesting because horses are also are useful in herds of mixed ungulates, like with cattle or bison or other things, because they have extremely tough, you know, you know, in terms of their feet, with their with their hooves, they have extremely tough hooves. And they are actually, you know, they evolved their behavior where there's a lot of snow is to kick the snow away and exposed to grass, whereas with cattle, they tend to use their snout, and so they're much more tentative about that sort of thing. And so herds in icy conditions, their horses, the cattle, will actually live off or utilize the labor of the horse, as the horse are clearing the snow, they will eat some of the grass that the horse clear. And so in the American West, even today, I know ranchers, they put horse in some of their herds because of that reason, apparently, or you know, that's happened. So the horse is very, very tough and adaptable to these cold, Eurasian steppe Ice Age conditions, and, you know, made a big impact on us. So I have written about cave paintings in the Pleistocene. So when European the ancestors of Cro-Magnon and the various European civilization societies like the Magdalenians and the Solutreans and, you know, all these other populations, the Gravettians, which I've talked about in earlier podcast, one of the things that they did is paint horses. And in fact, I wrote about magdalenians in my piece on France. The magdalenians painted a lot of horses. Even though they didn't eat too many horses, they mostly ate reindeer. So, you know, we're talking domestication, but for the vast majority of humans and our relationship to equids and horses, it's to eat them. Obviously, we're hunting them. They’re horses in these like ice age campsites, horse bones, and there was actually a site in France, some sort of gully that horses were apparently driven into for modern humans to kill. Anatomically modern humans to kill for about, like from for about 20,000 years. So it looks like some of the bones dated 32,000 years ago. Some of the bones date to 12,000 years ago. And apparently it's 100,000 about 100,000 horses seem to have been killed at that location. And remember, like my, Ice Age populations in Europe are probably pretty small. There's a lot of horses, you know, that are detectable. So I say like 20,000 years, 100,000 so that's like five horses a year. But, you know, these are the ones where the bones are identifiable. I think so, probably more than that. In any case, we ate horses. Humans ate horses. And a horse meat is obviously high in protein. It's very rich in blood. And people will say it's gamey. Gamey just means, like a lot of domestic animals that we eat today are pretty fatty. They don't move around a lot. Horses, in contrast, are very muscular, so, you know, be a very high protein source of meat. The fact that in caves like Lascaux and, you know, these French caves, French and Spanish caves, like Altamira as well, the way horses are depicted is interesting because it doesn't - You know, as time went on, there were fewer and fewer horses that they were hunting, and yet they kept getting depicted. So one of the hypotheses here is, you know, in different civilizations, horse become kind of associated with a particular God or principle, and the connections are sometimes a little interesting. Like Poseidon, for example, is associated with horses, even though he's a god of the sea. You know, there must be a history behind that. And you know, Indo-European societies have the horse sacrifice. It's very common in Hinduism, but also Rome's October horse, the Germanic peoples would do it. So horses, probably because of their size, their power, their strength, had an impact psychologically on human beings that a lot of the other Eurasian megafauna seemed not to I don't know why. Mammoth seemed like they would be really cool, but maybe they were just like big and plotting and they didn't capture imagination. Horse are large, but they also move very fast across the landscape. You know, when the first Mesopotamians encountered horses, they were just amazed at how incredibly powerful and fast they were compared to their onagers and other equids, other smaller equids, you know. So there's a psychological impact of. Horse on human beings. We know that. Wherever they are in Eurasia, humans seem to depict horses inordinate to the amount that they hunted them and they did hunt them a lot. And Native Americans also hunted them when they arrived in the new world. So depending on, you know, like the most recent wave, you know, definitely about 15,000 years ago, but really explode out around say 12,000 13,000 years ago, there are horse that are in their sights now. They did not, they did not seem to kill massive numbers of horse the same way that, say the gravettians did, or, you know, some of the solutreans did in Europe during the ice age. And why is that? It looks like the number of horse were just declining in the latter part of the Pleistocene, overall. Now they were shrinking from a lot of their habitat. Like part of this is the retreat of glaciers and the expansion of forests. So horses are not forest creatures. They're not browsers, they're grazers. And so as there was a climatic turnover, a lot of these big pleistocene mega fauna, that's what you need to think of the horse as, declined in in numbers, in population, and so there’s just less to hunt, Now, you know, there's an argument about whether we drove the extinction or whether it was climate change. To me, it's just like, pretty clear. There's a combination of both these species had survived earlier warm periods of the Eemian period was 110,000 to 130,000
years ago, or 115 to 125,000 whatever it's around there. It was warmer in some ways in our current phase. And Mammoth and all these other, you know, really, really, you know, charismatic mega fauna made it through there. But obviously we were just, first of all, modern humans were not in most of Eurasia at that time, if at all. And you know that we were not in North America, we were not in Australia. But when we arrive, you know, these species tend to start to decline or go extinct, even if they were just in like a low phase. So the stress of climate and humans does have some effect. You know, mega disappear in Australia when we show up. Same thing with North America. Now, some people say, Oh, well, you know, climate was changing too. But you know, why do ground sloths disappear in Cuba 6000 years? I think it's like 6000 years later than they disappear on the North American mainland. Well, that's when humans showed up in Cuba. So I think that definitely we are the final precipitating cause of these extinctions, even if the underlying dynamics were being driven by climate change in terms of smaller populations. So horses were getting smaller. Their populations were getting smaller as the climate was warming, as their grasslands in the northern hemisphere were retreating. In North America the Yukon horse is the last horse that survives, mostly in northern North America. Probably, as I said, gone like 7000 to 5000 years ago. So the equines, Equus, emerges in North America and goes extinct in North America, and it was reintroduced obviously later with the Columbian Exchange. We'll talk a little bit about that later in Eurasia. Horses also start disappearing all across Europe and other archeological sites, but they retreat to one particular eco zone, which a lot of you have heard about, because I've talked about it on this podcast, the Eurasian steppe, which stretches from, you know, pontic step, north of the Black Sea, all the way to Mongolia. There's branches of it, the I think so the Aföldan steppe , the Hungarian steppe is a part of it. There's a little bit also in Romania. And, you know, there's a little bit of a break in the Altai for the steppe. But, you know, it's not much of a break. The Eastern steppe is colder and drier than the Western steppe. In any case, it’s this belt of land around Eurasia, it was north of, you know, mostly desert, you know, or the Black Sea. Obviously, these are not habitats for horses. And a south of taiga, mostly taiga, and the deciduous forest to the in the West, and that is also not habitat for the horse. But, you know, these grasslands are great horse habitat, and the horses seem to have continued to flourish. There are different species of horses actually still, you know, early in the Holocene, there's a Chinese variety. There's a couple of varieties in Europe, and then there's a variety in the Eurasian steppe, a couple of varieties in the Eurasian steppe. I don't want to get too hung up on species to species or, you know, whatever, but like, the different horses look a little different in the board morphology. Genetically, We have some information now, and I'm going to get into that later. But yeah, there are a bunch of different horse species at the beginning of the Holocene, after the end of the ice age. And today, there's really one major horse species, E. caballus, the domestic horse. But then there's also Mongolian wild horse, which is related, but seems to be descended from a particular Eurasian lineage that was domesticated by the Botai people in Kazakhstan, more than 5000 years ago. And then they stopped, you know, with their horse culture. And they went feral, right? The two horse lineages actually have different number of chromosomes. There's a lot of interesting genetic biology, molecular genetic work when it comes to the chromosome numbers of horses. There's some papers on that I can get into that, like I'm interested as a geneticist, but, you know, it's not really part of this topic, so I will just kind of leave that for the interested listener, okay, but so you have all these horses about like 11,700 years ago, beginning of the Holocene, and they're mostly, you're obviously the Eurasian. They disappear in North America, probably a combination of human predation, and just like the grasslands are too small. Maybe it was too much competition from North American bison. I don't know why that would be, why that would matter, but the horse did make it in Eurasia and didn’t make it North America. One thing to note is that this is a period where agriculture starts emerging all across the world, starting in the West Asia, initially in terms of domestication, the earliest domesticates are goat and sheep, and then, like right after that, I think cattle. So caprids, goat and sheep, cattle, and then pigs very soon after this is all like within, like, you know, 10,000 to 8000 years ago. The horse is relatively late. You know, donkeys and wild ass were domesticated earlier. The horse is relatively late. Part of the issue here is that David Anthony has talked about this “The Horse, The Wheel, And Language”
Listen to my podcast with him. So, you know, listen to those. But basically, the Eurasian steppe is just not hospitable for humans, for human hunter gatherers or human farmers, there's just not that much water. It's open territory. It's hot, it's cold, you know, everything in between. You know, just not optimal for people that are on foot. You know, North America was similar, actually, like in these native peoples we're hugging the river lands for a long time. So same thing in Eurasia. So that means that the horse lacked human predators across much of the Eurasian stuff, because, you know, it's flat, so it's not like you could drive them into a gully, and you can, like, perch from above, and you know, they're like sitting targets. There's nothing like that. You got to chase them. And, you know, unless they're running at you or you have, like, a really good bow shot that hits it, it's probably unlikely. So horses are stable in population. Relatively in the Eurasian steppe, they make it like a few of the other mega fauna while, you know, you know, while they're like all these big changes in the river valley. So people are farming, often millet at this latitude, in this area. And sometimes they go out into the steppe to hunt for a few things, but really they keep to themselves, but eventually they were domesticated. And so this is a huge argument, a huge discussion. I'm not gonna go into all the different literature. Domestication of the horse is also associated now with human history, with events related to humans, and, you know, I need to talk about that a little bit. Okay, so there are a few potential sites of domestication or two. Okay, so I will tell you my position. My position is, I think, that probably some sort of taming and semi domestication occurred a couple of times, multiple times, on the Eurasian steppe around the step, maybe even because our horses, like, you know, kind of like the woodland zones of Europe as well and in China. But, you know, obviously the genetic data is clear. We have one particular domestic lineage that is prevalent all around the world except for the Przewalski’s Mongolian wild horse. This. These are the horses as we know them, Equus ferus caballus. In any case, this is a domestic horse, and it's a particular lineage. It's a particular lineage. I think it's like the DOM2 lineage. You know, the is what it's called in the genetic literature. It dates to 2200 BCE BC. Now, we know this from a paper by Ludovic Orlando’s group. They've been doing a lot of work on Horse DNA for like, the last five years, I think so. And they've got some, a lot of ancient DNA. And the most recent paper, widespread horse mobility, arose around 2200, BC. You know, basically what they're showing here is that on the Pontic steppe looks like, again, Indo Iranian lineage, probably Indo Iranian people, maybe like very, very early Sintashta but post Yamnaya is really what caused us. The the spread of the horse, but there’s the Botai people in Kazakhstan. And the Botai people are not Indo Europeans. They flourish between 3700- 3100 BC. So they're contemporaneous with the with the Yamnaya before they expanded. They're in Kazakhstan.
So Winegards book and Taylor's book, both of them, I think they both lead to the idea that the Botai did domesticate the horse. The Botai horses are ancestral to looks like to the Mongolian wild horse looks like their horses went feral because they culture eventually disappeared. Okay, so the Botai don't seem to be really nomads. They seem to be using horses to hunt other horses. So they domesticated some horses to hunt other horses. They also seem to have milked some of their mares. The thing that persuades me, and like there's all sorts of arguments about whether they had bits or not. Bits, so you can tell the people have been riding horses obviously based on some sort of first of all, the people themselves, their bones change in terms of the deformations, and the horse also look like they've been ridden, those also change. And then when you have horse, when you have like equipment, like Bits and other things, they they leave marks in the teeth. It's mixed whether this works for the Botai but the key evidence point that convinces me is many of them were buried with many, many, many horses. And the distribution of ages look more like they were domesticates. You know, if you're a hunter, how are you going to get high status Hunter? How are you going to get buried with, like, you know, 14 horses that are killed at the same time. If you're a hunter, you're not, you don't keep tame horses if you're just solely a hunter, right? So, it looks like they had horses on reserve. They were riding horses probably. They obviously didn't have stirrups, which you guys know about, like those things on the side that you put your feet in. But they probably, I mean, they did not have bronze bits to steer the horse. Maybe they grabbed them by the main maybe they had some organic, you know, maybe they had, like, something like some sort of rope or something like that that they used to like track the horse. These were not people that were going from one end of the Eurasian steppe to the other. You know, their horse culture would have been primitive. They weren't using chariots. If they were using horses, they're either raising them to eat them, but probably they were eating them, but they're probably also riding them to chase other horses. Because if you're a horse Hunter, going on foot versus going on another horse is obviously an enormous difference, right? So, I think the Botai culture did probably domesticate horses after a fashion. Botai culture is an Ancestral North Eurasian population, mostly, mostly like, you know, Western Paleo Siberian, not European at all, you know. But those are not the horses that are all across the world right now. Those horses were, it seems, domesticated by the Sintashta people, the Sintashta culture of the Southern Urals and Volga region. Who were the Sintashta? It looks like the Sintashta are probably the ancestor of the Indo Iranians. They descend from the Abashevo culture, who are like copper miners just a little to the west of them, and who themselves descend from the Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture, who look like some sorts of agro pastoralists moving in ox carts out of, say, Belarus, you know, Eastern Poland, out of the Corded Ware culture. So Sintashta are descendants of corded wear, the eastern branch of corded wear, genetically, they're just like corded wear. So about like 70% yamaya 30% Neolithic farmer. Globular Amphora from Poland now they also have a little bit of Siberian hunter gatherer. It starts to come into their system. You know, look, they're in the southern Urals. These are people that they're interacting with. There are genetic outliers in Sintashta fortification. So they're obviously assimilating people from surrounding peoples and neighboring peoples. Also they were interacting with the early Finno-Ugric people, the Seima Tuebino culture. Finno-Urgric people, Finnick people like a Finnish and Estonian have Indo-Iranian loan words. So it's clearly due to this interaction with the Sintashta, as the Finnic people were moving in the central Urals, and Sintashta were the southern Urals. In any case, going back to the horses, there's a particular lineage of horse that they seem to have domesticated that’s ancestral, to great extent to all other horses. Now, there were other horses in Europe. There were other horses in China. Some of that genetic material was introgressed, but most of the ancestry today is from this. They call it the DOM2 lineage. I think it's like because it's domestic two. Yeah, modern domestic horses, because there must have been a DOM1 lineage, if I but I mean, I've never seen this referred to what was going on with the Yamnaya. So David Anthony actually came out with a paper, his group, that some of the Yamnaya populations in places like the Balkans. Yeah. So this is P Librato 2021, oh, that's Orlando as well. So that's, that's another Sintashta paper, excuse me. And so an earlier paper of Orlando showed something very similar, but they also said that there was selection in the DOM2 for adaptations, in particular genes that are associated with calmness and docility. Also the horses look like they're a little bit more coordinated, a little bigger, so there’s selection going on. But, you know, was there earlier domestication of the horse that didn't take okay? I think yes, so I lean with Anthony that the that the horse was domesticated in part, or tamed by the yamnaya. I think Kristian Kristiansen, who I've had the podcast, also believes this, because some of his arguments about Koryos and the spread of male bands seemed to rely on ponies, you know. So I think what happened is that there's a different type or different extent of domestication that occurred earlier. And basically what Anthony shows is the Anthony and his, you know, colleagues, other people that agree with his position. Had a show that people, that men, you know the riders. It looks like there are people that were riding horses. I guess that's what I'm saying, because, you know, you get bow legged. There's all sorts of things that are going on here. So there are probably people that were riding horses, in my opinion, yeah. And I found that, I found the paper, it's ‘the first bioanthropological evidence for horseship’ So also they found milk, horse milk, mares milk, which is a, it's like this, like, sweeter, higher in protein, maybe, or higher, and also higher lactose. So in any case, so horse milk was kept and so there was no writing equipment like those bits, bronze bits, all these things are all later. They all date to the santashta, right? But they found that human skeletons, five yamnaya individuals dated to 3021 to 3021, and 2501
in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary display changes in bone morphology and distinct pathology study with horseback riding. These are the oldest humans identified as riders so far. This is 2023 March. Okay. If this is true, these are almost certainly not DOM2 okay, they're probably like, smaller, they're probably not as optimal as horses, certainly not hitched to chariots. They're probably ridden bareback, or they're ridden bareback because the saddle comes later, right, you know, and eventually, like, the initial saddles, by the way, are just like, obviously, like cloth, but later, saddles obviously are stiff and they allow people to, you know, there's all sorts - the compliments to horse's horse culture, create a huge technological industrial complex emerged around this. But in any case, sorry for rambling, but I am trying to get at - I think we have multiple stages of horse domestication, we had a false dawn, and that false dawn is associated, some with you, with the yamnaya, their spread, the rapidity, their nomadism. I think that they did have some association with horses. They probably kept horse herds. It wasn't as close as the later Sintashta. These horses were too small, too skittish, to be hitched to chariots. But I think young men probably did ride these horses and use them. They were not cavalry insofar as, you know, they didn't shoot the Parthian shot, shoot bow and arrows off them. They probably didn't like, you know, use their spears. The swords are, you know, swords are very, very swords don't show up around to like, 1000 BC, put it that way. So they didn't probably, like, use their spears or javelins off horseback, but they probably use the horseback the horses. So, Anthony believes they use the horses for their herds, maintenance of their herds. And also, I think Kristiansen would say they probably use the horses to ride them and use them as, like, mobility devices, you know, show up at dawn raids. Like you ride the horse, you tie them up somewhere, and then you go do your raid. You capture some people. I mean, probably you don't capture people because, like, how you're gonna carry the back, but you kill some people, maybe get some booty. And then you get back on the horse and you ride back to your village. So I think that's what these early yamaya horses were for. The Sintashta horses are a whole different thing. So a lot of the words related to horses and horse culture seem to come from the Sintashta. The Indo Europeans had an earlier word for horse that also the the Anatolians had, the Hittites. So the association between horses and Indo Europeans is older than the Sintashta. And I think this goes back to the Pleistocene, evidence that people just thought horses were cool, and they wanted to be associated with horses in some ways, and they thought horses were kind of like almost divine creatures. And also, you know, you know, they ate the horses, but they also are, these are the fastest large animals that are on the plains. And I think they did tame horses pretty early on, periodically, maybe not as early as the Clan of the Cave bear. But you know, they tame horses. I think even though you know tame horses are like like elephants, you know, elephants are not domestic. They're ta they can be tamed, though, I think that there could be tame horses. And I think they had a knowledge of horses, but a lot of details of horse culture come from Indo Iranian languages. And why? And I think that's because the DOM2 lineage is the dominant lineage of the world. I mean, it's almost the only one. There's some admixture from earlier lineages that you can find. And they invented the light war chariot. The light war chariot basically dominated Eurasia as David Reich calls it a weapon of mass destruction. But, you know, it spread from 2200 BC. Was invented the southern Urals by about like 1100 BC, when it finally is, like, really mature and kind of like the central weapon of war in Shang Dynasty China. Or the end of Shang Dynasty China, on the Yellow River plain, as the Shang and the Zhou are kind of battling for supremacy. So it's a light or chariot. It's two wheeled. It's got a bunch of spokes, you know, pulled by like two horses. These are strong. Another issue is, you know, the genetics seems to make it clear Orlando's group, that the docility is one of the things about these horses that's notable about these horses. Probably one way to, I think Winegard says one way that you could think about this is that these horses were, there might have been a stallion that was extremely docile, and humans bred that stallion and its lineage. So if a stallion is very docile, it might not normally actually be a very fit stallion in wild herds. But, you know, humans prefer that, and so this stallions lineage seems to have spread, and this is the way horses seem to be bred. And certain traits spread across horses is through stallions, because horses are polygynous. One male stallion has all these mares in this herd. And so you just select for the stallion, and then you could bring wild mares to the herd, and that's how introgression happens. Of these, like various local lineages. Horse Y chromosome lineages, which are passing through the bed, tend to exhibit this, like, crazy, crazy, low, effective population bottleneck, where the population size is very low because you're breeding off only a few of the horses, whereas the mares tend to be much more genetically diverse. So I think you get the picture of that in terms of what's going on, like you're selecting for these exceptional stallions, and then the stallions could breed with hundreds of horses, hundreds of mares, if you so choose, you know, if you restrict it. Okay, so this happened around 2200 BC, what Orlando's data shows, what his group's data shows, along with, like modern data, and with Asian data, is there's a massive population bottleneck before 2200 BC, which means that there must be like narrowing selection and then the massive population jump and shorter generation times after 2200 BC. So there's like a huge, huge period of breeding. The paper, by the way, widespread horse mobility around 2200 BC, huge, huge amount of intensive breeding around these centuries to create the special type of horse. The effective population size, just like, goes like from hundreds to 10,000 you know, very quickly in these populations. So these are in the Sintashta They're the Central, West Central steppe between the Dnieper and the Volga River. And one issue here is, I find it not, not coincidental, but I think, I think it has to be notable that 2200 BC, there's a massive drought that kicked off all across the world. There was like this is after this period. Is when Sumerian civilization collapses. Old Kingdom Egypt collapses. Yeah, Old Kingdom, Indus Valley Civilization goes into sharp decline. So probably the drought might have been actually good for horses, in terms of expanding grasslands for a bit. And, you know, the development of this chariot culture. So, you know, there were chariots in the Near East. You know, pulled by, pulled by. You know, donkeys and onagers, you know, could be pulled by four chariots didn't have spoke wheels. It was all really primitive. They're basically like just big wagons dragging soldiers from point to point. Okay, the Sintashta chariot was probably different. There's all sorts of arguments in the literature, but one thing is, like, probably It was partly associated with an archer. There's probably, you know, a charioteer, and then there's an archer along with him, you know. And so definitely, by the end of the Bronze Age, chariots in places like the battle of Kadesh, whatever, between the Hittites and the Egyptians. It seems like chariots were mounted devices. They were basically like, you know, mobile instruments for archery in a lot of these places. Because some people say, Oh, well, you know, you take a chariot from place to place, and it allows people to move fast, obviously. So that's a big difference, because horses are fast, you know, you could takes about, like, probably takes six months to a year to walk across Eurasia. The Mongols their Pony Express to go 30 days, you know. So it obviously shrinks. It shrinks the time a lot, order of magnitude, maybe. But, you know, probably archery was, was closely associated with this charioteering, and some of the Greek - so chariots spread all across your region really fast, right? They show up in Egypt with the Hyksos between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom become really big in Egypt. They're obviously huge among the Hittites the Mesopotamians, you know, chariots are the weapon of choice for like these, like first battle of battle, like Kadesh was the first documented battle. Chariots are in Mycenaean Greece. In Bronze Age Greece, they started showing up, you know, in places like Europe, also at the end the same time, end of the Bronze Age. And, you know, there's still been use in places like Ireland, you know, pretty late into the Iron Age. Actually, in a few places in China, they're used also, like pretty late.
So the chariots in I think the Ulster Cycle, and also the Iliad, what people do there is so this might be idiosyncrasy of Ireland. And also Homer was a dark age poet. So he did remember the Bronze Age in all his details, they use the chariots to go to the battlefield. They get off the chariot, then they fight, at least in Mycenaean Greece, probably, again, chariots were probably used mostly as a conveyances for archers, and so you would have archers shooting outside these chariots, strafing infantrymen. This presumably is what was happening, right? So chariots are a major technology and elite status symbol as well, and also around this period, it's almost certainly when a particular Sun cult associated with the chariot spreads all across Eurasia. So the sun cult is, you know, the Greeks, is a Greek mythology. Helios, the sun god is being pulled by a chariot with a horse. So horses, chariots and sun gods are closely associated in Indo, European mythos at this time, it says In Hinduism, it's Surya is in the chariot. So it's same God as Helios, Surya and soul have the same root, Solaris. But this sun cult actually persisted in Scandinavia, the chariot with the with the sun drawing, dragging the sun in Scandinavia up until the sixth sixth century, end of the sixth century, up until about 600 ad, and then there was a really, really bad winter, and the sun cult ended. So the sun cult continued to Scandinavia from the Middle Bronze Age, like 1500 BC, down to 600 ad, and then, like eventually, ended during a long winter of the seventh century with Scandinavia, got really cold, and, you know, they changed it to these different, the halls and their particular gods and everything that you know, emerged there, you know. But it seems like there was a group of elite charioteers that spread all across the world at this time. Now, with the Sintashta, as they went south, they turned into the Andronovo horizon, which is a bunch of related cultures of Indo Iranians. Some of them went into the Indian subcontinent, became the Indo Aryans. Some of them went into Iran and became the ancestors of the Persians and the Medes. Some of them stayed on the steppe, became Scythians. Scythians are mixed in part with some Siberian populations around the Altai. And then the Scythians expanded westward from the Far East, what is today, Eastern Kazakhstan. They expend expanded these Iranian speaking cities, expanded all the way to Hungary. Herodotus mentioned the Scythians, the Royal Scythians, their elite, come from the east. And so they were correct in that genetics makes it pretty clear Scythians have a little bit of - they have, like about 10% Siberian ancestry, and some of their cultural tendencies, like some of their tattooing, some of their motifs are clearly Siberian, assimilated from their Siberian ancestry, Siberian neighbors. So the horse allows these people to expand all across the Eurasian steppe back and forth and create like this vast interaction zone. In Syria, there's a state called the Mitanni that seems to be ruled primarily by a horse chariot riding elite during the Bronze Age and these charioteers were called the Maryannu. Maria is actually an Iranian word means young male warriors. It’s got the same root from Aria. Anu is from the urartan language of eastern Anatolia. So it was a combination. But maryannu were all over the Near East, probably something like the Maryannu Iranian origin Charioteers actually did spread it in Europe, but they got assimilated. There doesn't seem like much of a genetic impact. They weren't like that different, because, you know, these are people from the steppe. They had never been to India or Iran. So, you know, we don't want to overemphasize how different they were from Europeans, but it looks like in Europe, the cultural diffusion occurred, the cultural transmission occurred. But unlike Iran and Indian subcontinent, it wasn't the spread of the Iranian languages Indo Iranian languages, just like it was in the Near East, it wasn't the spread of indo Iranian languages, although Vedic Gods seem to be clearly worshiped in Syria by the Mitanni, and that's how we know that they were probably Indo Iranian or Indo Aryan. They also went eastward. They clearly spread it among Mongolian society, slab grave culture, the horse, the idea of a chariot, shows up in China around 1300 BC. These are almost certainly Iranian people. So in the Tarim Basin today, it's obviously Turkic speaking. In the past, it was Tocharian and Iranian. So Tocharian is famously a pastoralist language that probably came with pastoralists the Altai branch of the early yamnaya, and the people, you know, look more European and some of their cave paintings, but really, a lot of them were also Iranian speakers. Never had been to Iran they're directly descended from populations from the steppe of the Andronovo horizon, and they occupied the southern rim of the Tarim basin. So the oasis on the southern rim tend to be Iranian. Oasis on the northeastern rim tended to be Tocharian. And so these Iranian people had spread eastward into China. There's a little bit of Iranian ancestry, like a little bit that you can detect a lot of Northern Chinese. I think they're probably mostly spread through Mongolic people or Turkic people, because groups like the Xiongnu, the ancestors of the Huns, they absorbed Iranian populations into them, clearly. And these Iranian populations are the vectors for the transmission of horse culture. Okay, and so on the eastern steppe, it's drier, you know, there's fewer opportunities for talent. Looks like mostly horses and sheep. And they adopt these DOM2 horses, and become an essential part of their culture. You know, they drink the mares milk. They, you know, also ferment it. They create It's called kumis in Kazakh, I believe. And this is, this is drunk down into like, you know, period of Chinggis Khan and later. So there are these people that become entirely mobile. And around 1000 BC, the horses get big enough and powerful enough that the Scythians are the ones that really start creating the world's first mobile cavalry. So the difference between cavalry and chariots is pretty obvious chariots are, well, you're not on the horse. The horses just had to be smaller. They're not strong, not as robust. The horses got bigger. The Scythian horses are more robust. Scythians, you know, they create, I think they created the saddles. They didn't have stirrups yet, but they, you know, obviously had bronze bits, you know, the bridles and whatnot, all these other things that you need to control the horse. And so the Scythians show up in western Eurasia. That's how we know them. And they call themselves the Skutha. The word Ashkenazi is actually from Scythians. It's Ashkenaz in the Old Testament. Is from the North. They come through the Caucasus. The the central asianist and tibetologist Christopher Beckwith, has a book called “The Scythian Empire” Basically, he argues that the Achaemenians like inherited, basically a Scythian empire that Darius’s lineage himself was Scythian. So Scythians are steppe Iranians, as opposed to the Iranians of you know, Persia Iran proper. Persians are from Southwestern Iran, so they're on the edge, and they're kind of more Mesopotamian, right? So anyway, Scythians and these like steppe Iranians, are a part of the Near East as the Assyrian Empire is about to end the Assyrians had adopted cavalry from the Scythians initially. They had a weird way of doing it, though. You know that these horses are stronger because they had one guy with one person who would ride the horse, and another person seated next to them or behind them, who would have a who have an archer. In contrast, the Scythians and a lot of the steppe people, they use, what was called the Parthian shot later on, where they would ride, turn backward, and then shoot as they were retreating. And now one thing about this is it's probably better that they don't have a stirrup for this, just because the biomechanics of it apparently, like it just pushes to the front of the horse. So that's what they were doing. These are not necessarily like, you know, with with lances and spears. They are using arrows on the steppe, and then they transmit that to West Asia. So, you know, the Persians adopt this. The Persians adopt a lot of mounted cavalry. The Greeks know this.
Now, the Greeks don't have that much cavalry. Okay, they don't have that many horses. So one of the aspects of the horses, these large horses is they are now central to the armies of Eurasia. They're also starting to be used on farms. Horses. You know, they're not as strong as some of the oxen but, you know, they can be very convenient with certain types of plows, and for a lot of like mid strength tasks, they're faster and better, you know. So there's some efficiencies with the horses. But the issue is that you need you need forage. So one reason that, like the Mongols, for example, didn't go much past Hungary, is because they couldn't feed their horses. The horses cannot feed in these forests unless you feed them the grain of the farmer. And, you know, they're predating on these farmers, so they're not gonna get the grain. Greece, Greece proper is mountainous, and it's not good horse territory. They don't have that many horses. The Persians have horses from some of their central Asian you know, some of their northern plains territories where there are horses in Greece, is what later became Macedonia. Macedonia, or Macedonia, I don't know you want to say it. This is where Alexander the Great and his father, Philip of Macedon, perfected a sort of a macedonian cavalry. And so Macedonia cavalry, as you know, like you guys have seen, probably the mosaic or fresco of Alexander, they were not they were not archers. They had lances. And so these were shock troops. So there's two ways that the cavalry became important as archers. This is what the Huns tended to do and the Mongols, or as shock troops. And so the Macedonian shock troops had a had a Persian, Iranian counterpart, I'll go with the Parthians called Cataphracts. So they're heavily armed. They have armor. The horses start to have armor on them, like, if you see some of the depictions, and they have lances. And so the idea of these shock troops is they're bearing down on you, and they can break infantry. It's not like, from what I understand, it's not like a game of thrones. The horses are not going to run into a bunch of phalanx and crack them. It's just that, like, you know, infantry get, like, frightened enough there will be a break in an opening, and once there's an opening, then the horses can, the cavalry can, like, kind of just like, March through. And also cavalry are really good for running down retreating enemies from behind. In any case, you have these two different strands. You have the Lancers, and you have the archers. The archers are more central Asian, later to become Turkic. Whereas the Lancers are more of kind of a Eurasian, sedentary, civilized tradition, they have these bigger horses that you have for that are armored, that are shock troops. Eventually the stirrups show up. So stirrups, like, allow them to, you know, use the classic jousting position when you lean down, forward and in, and then your feet are in. And so ideally the lance is going into somebody else or something. And so this is what Europeans eventually evolved into, the feudal period. But this took a little while. So I want to say here that horses are a luxury animal, unlike, say, I don't know, goat or a donkey. They are extremely hungry. You know, they eat like, like, one to 2% of their weight every day in grass, something, no, it's like almost 3% it's 3% you know, it's like, that's not trivial about and you know, they're big. They need space. And they need specialized people to who know how to deal with horses. So the Chinese, for example, just because probably Malthusian conditions, they're crowded Malthusian territory. They don't have territory for, like, a lot of horses. So they would get horses from the steppe, or they would get steppe mercenaries. At one point, the martial emperor, you know, that was his nickname, Han Wudi actually sent a delegation to Fergana modern day Tajikistan, to get, like, big numbers of horses. So getting horses, procuring horses, was like getting oil or something. I don't know. It was a major, major resource that these pre modern people were fixated on. And so the horses tend to be found on the steppe, uh, kind of the colder climates. So India had a problem, for example, that not only was it crowded, there weren't like big pastures for horses, but it's hot. And once you start to get to tropical climates, wet tropical climates, horses tend to have some issues. It's easier in drier climates. So talk a little bit about the Arabian horses later. But you know, the Arabs obviously had some good horses in their dry heat. But you know, Indians in the Vedas, obviously, horses are a big deal. Horse sacrifices are a big deal. You know these Indo Aryan Sintashta descended people brought a memory of Horse culture. But, you know, horses had a hard time in much of the subcontinent, especially the Gangetic plain of the east or the south, which was like kind of tropical dryer areas were a little easier later on in history. You know, a lot of the victories of Turkic Muslims in the subcontinent probably has to deal with the fact that they had ready access to horses because they were connected to Central Asia, a central Asian diaspora, a central Asian homeland, that they could get horses from later on, like Tipu Sultan and some of these South Indian rulers that were moderately successful provisioned horses from Europeans, you know. So horses are a major rate limiter for pre modern armies. So after about like 300 ad, you know, we shift from infantry to horses. So the ancient Roman legion was very disciplined, very powerful, and, you know, it didn't have a problem with the cavalry, of, say, the Sarmatians or other groups. But eventually it looks like this, sort of like highly disciplined infantry needs a level of state capacity that later Eurasian societies after the collapse of the Roman Empire, collapse of the Han dynasty lacked, and there was a pivot towards horses and cavalry. Part of it was that groups like the Huns show up in Europe and just like wreck havoc everywhere. And so you know, populations like you know, tribes like the Visigoths, they take to the horse as well. And you know, they become mobile, mobile populations on the horse, like not quite horse nomads of the steppe. So obviously, if you're in Western Europe, there's no steppe, and so you have to probably feed the horse some of your grain. This is expensive. Horses are luxury good, and this is a precursor to feudalism. So feudalism and the horse are connected. Because, you know, now you have no longer a tax, a money tax economy. You have an in kind tax economy, you provide service. One of the services that these knights were providing, that these, like lesser nobility, rural Gentry, were providing, was their military service, and they had to bring a horse. Obviously, a horse is expensive. Poor peasants probably using a horse if they're using a horse for work on the farm, not for military purposes, right? So these military horses were like extremely, extremely like, important luxury goods that these knights were bringing to the ruler, right? And the horses were important to combat the horses of groups like the Magyars. Magyar show up from Central Asia they’re Ugaric speaking people that are highly turkified Culturally, and their raids go as far as Spain, deep into France and to Germany. So you need horses. You need mounted cavalry to chase them, drive them away, to engage them. Whereas, obviously, if there were just laying siege, you could probably do without horses. But do you really want these barbarians from the Central Asian steppe to run roughshod,. To some extent, Eurasian societies assimilated steppe elites or steppe folkways, to become immune to the predation of the steppe. So you have the Huns and the Avars and the Magyar show up in Europe by about 1000 ad. You have this idea in Western Europe in particular, but also also the Byzantines had a similar system where their primary soldiers were actually quite similar to Parthian Cataphracts. They were kind of heavily armed, hheavy cavalry to
defend themselves against steppe barbarians they become mounted themselves. In China, you have the Sui-Tang Dynasty, which is part Xiangbe Turk and part Han. So, you know, the Tang emperors, famously, unlike the later emperors, who were much more civilian orientation. You know, they hunted on the steppe in the margins of Northwest China and Gansu and Shaanxi in the Ordos region. And like horse culture was a part of kind of their inheritance. And that's how they defeated the steppe warriors. They became similar to the steppe warriors. Again, there was always an issue, though, with these, some of these Eurasian societies, with how are you going to provision the horse? How are you going to keep them alive? Because it's not their native ecology, so you have to feed the horse grain that would otherwise go to humans or other animals that you eat, because the horse you generally do not eat. Now, here's one interesting thing that happened around this period between 500 BC and 500 ad, a bunch of ideologies emerge where you just don't eat the horse. So in Europe, in 732 AD, the pope banned Horse meat consumption. Part of it was because horse meat consumption was part of pagan practices in Northern Europe. Probably part of it just has to do with how valuable the horse had become. You do not consume your weapon of war and also your workhorse in the field. So in Islam, both Sunni and Shia tend to be skeptical of horse meat consumption. In Judaism, you know, you don't consume horses. And in much of Asia, horse meat consumption is pretty rare. And this probably this has spiritual Justifications, ideological justifications. But like, the reality is, like, horses are much more valuable as weapons of war or as transport than they are as food, right? So, just like, Why say, the Indian subcontinent cows are used - people get milk from cows. That's better than eating them. You know, that's the theory. That's the economic theory. So I just want to bring up that, you know, horses are luxury good in terms of what they bring. They obviously bring war. But I want to emphasize with the Eurasian steppe, they're also information technology. They're spreading spreading ideas all across the world. They're spreading the Turkic languages deep into Europe, as well as into place like Manchuria in China. The Turks were originally Siberian foragers. Probably the original Turks were probably like a tribe of Smiths. But eventually they got on the horse. They probably spread the stirrup originally to Europe and other places and into China In any case, but
they didn't bring an ideology, right? They brought language. They brought ethnicity. The Arabs brought an ideology. Now the original Arabs were not - the original Arab invasion. Seemed to be infantry. They did not have the wealth to have horses. The Battle of Yarmuk, where they defeated the Byzantines, for example, in Syria, was was infantry. The Arabs were infantry, but later on, they were clearly mounted on horses, to some extent camels as well. But really, camels are more beasts of burden. They're actually better than horses as a beast of burden. Horses are just fast and they're just excellent weapons of war. So when they cross with Arabs and their Berber, their Berber troops led by Tariq, who was himself a Berber, into Spain in the early eighth century, you know, horses were driving it. So they were mounted horse driven armies. And armies that marched into northern to Southern Gaul to Aquitania to Francia, I think, called Nuestria at the time, and met Charles Martel, were actually mounted armies. Now, one of the things some people say is Charles Martel defeated the Arabs at Poitier because he had mounted troops with stirrups. This is actually not right. Charles Martel forces were actually at the top of a hill, and they had infantry that were like pikemen. And so that he, Charles Martel actually executed correctly the strategy that Alfred - not Alfred the Great - Harold Godwinson, attempted against William the Conqueror. The Arabs kept trying to get them to break formation, and they wouldn't. And then eventually they just charged them, and the infantry held. Once the Arabs were disrupted, the Arab armies and Muslim armies probably, they were probably Berber at this time, not Arab the Frankish cavalry that came up from behind as shock troops and smashed them. So there was a difference between the Muslims, Arabs empires, any of the Turks and the and the Europeans here. The Europeans really focus, you know the classic medieval, form like peaks in the High Middle Ages of the medieval knight as a shock troop, as a heavy cavalry. And so that the idea here is like you have a quick shock attack and you defeat them, and they scatter. Whereas the Arabs and the Turks, they were more mixed in their strategies, and they would often use more of the steppe way of trying to soften up the enemy with arrows from afar and just kind of harass them and, like, wear them down, rather than meet them in a single shock, right? So some of the European depictions of Saladin versus Richard the Lionheart, where they're both like knights, is obviously anachronistic, because Saladin wouldn’t dress like a knight. Arabs and Turks would be a little bit lighter, not totally, but a little bit lighter, I think, in arms, especially the Arabs and like focus on mobility, while the European knights were pretty heavily armed. I mean, some of the high middle age knights were so heavy that if you knocked them off their saddle, they might it would very hard for them to get back on. So you just they were very vulnerable. They really had to win the shock. So around this time, with the Arabs showing up in the Spain of the eighth century, is where there's new breeds coming and coming into being. So what I've read is, so there's top two lineage that explodes with the Sintashta around 2200 BC. But that's not the only explosion that's happening. Apparently, the Arabian lineage, which is the root of most by almost all modern horses, is the Arabian lineage shows up around this time with the Muslims. So the Arabian lineage is more muscular, it's longer, it's taller. Apparently, its hooves are wider. This is probably because of the dry, sandy soil, you know, whatever these are the ancestors, the thoroughbreds and like quarter horses and all the other horses. So, you know, there was another replacement here. There was a sister lineage, like a Turkic horse, a Turkestan horse, which was a little bit different. It did contribute to sub lineages, but it's not as dominant. And this is like a little stockier animal, a little smaller, and also the hooves are narrower because it was like it was, you know, colder climates and stone territory, maybe mountainous territory, I don't know. But so there's another spread of horse types into Europe at this time, from West Asia, probably originally from Central Asia. And this is the horse. That is the ancestor of the modern lineage of horses, right? So, by the Middle Ages the horse is king. It's starting to spread into Africa. Now, in Africa, places like Africa, Southeast Asia, Southern India, horses have a problem because of disease. You know, there's all sorts of issues related to that. And they take a while to spread, but you know, they do, okay in the Sahel, there's some Islamic empires by around, like, you know, 1500 ad, a little earlier in the Sahel, south of the Sahara, horses are, you know, present in the Horn of Africa around that time too. They're still not present in South Africa until Europeans show up. Like South Africa is in the far south, Europeans show up after 1500 but they do eventually show up there too, but those are transported all across the world. How we know that? Because when there's something called the horse latitudes, where there's doldrums, there's not that much wind for sails. And in these areas, the horses would die, they would have to discard them. But they show up in Europe, obviously, Columbus and his and his successors bring horses back to North America. And you know, there's been some argument recently about whether the Native Americans had memory of horses. Maybe they did, but the Old North American horses do not, did not exist. These are obviously all descendants from E. caballus DOM2 horses, the wild horses that you see in North America are all feral. They're descended from Spanish Mustangs, which is again, like the Arabian lineage. Horses transformed North America just like they transformed It seems like the Indo Europeans on the steppe. So the Horse Warriors, like the Lakota Sioux, and then, like the south Kiowa, the Comanche, these were populations that had been kind of sedentary, foragers, farmers in the valleys, and then the horse shows up. And by the 18th century, all these societies are transformed. They become mobile. They become very militaristic, they become very patrilineal. All of the things that you probably happen in the Eurasian steppe happened in North America later, because the horse shows up later. It's interesting that they adopted the horse so quickly, but you know, that's not entirely surprising, because this is a very pre adopted domestic animal. When the horse showed up for the Aztecs, when they saw the horse, when they saw Spaniards with the horses, they thought that that was one creature. So this probably harkens back to the idea that centaur, which shows up in Greek mythology, which is probably associated with the first batch of Calvary, maybe the Scythians around like 800 BC. Scythians were all over Greece by the way, there were Scythian soldiers in Athens. They show up at the plays. Scythian Soldiers are police, right? Like they're basically used like police. So with the Aztec see Spaniards on a horse, they think it's like some sort of weird creature. Now the horse obviously, are very good. They're better than the local domestics that they had say in Peru with the llama in terms of speed and robustness, you know. But you know, they're not invulnerable. So, you know, as such, obsidian weapons can kill Spanish horses. You know, the Spanish horses are almost decapitated, apparently, by some of these extremely sharp obsidian weapons. But in any case, it allows Spaniards and Europeans as a whole to spread extremely fast across this whole zone of North America. And the horse is present in the interior of North America by the end of the 18th century, by the end of the 1700s it's everywhere. And you know, the populations are developed mythologies around the horse. Their folkways are revolving around the horse. They're on the back of the horse. They're using the horse to, obviously, now hunt bison. This is probably the kind they're actually living, more like the Botai, as opposed to, you know, the Botai hunters, right? The Botai of Kazakhstan, 3000 BC, are hunters, whereas, you know, the later Eurasians are are pastoralists, while these original Native Americans, these Native Americans are more hunters. They're hunting bison they're bison hunters. So this is a recapitulating this ancient Bronze Age way of life, and it just shows you that humans and horses, they have a particular way of interacting. That is notable, I guess, and, like, replicable. Okay, so question of the new world now, and so, you know, it's like the 16th century. And you know, they're all over the world. They spread everywhere. And there's all these horses and all these lineages, they're from DOM2 and later, the Arabians, mostly, bu
kind of like the period of horse military domination that started around 300 ad is, is kind of gonna fade, okay, around this period of why? And that's because of new weapons. This is a revenge of the infantry, the revenge of relatively less skilled soldiers. So you could have a, you know, this was the period. I mean, to some extent it was already began in the Middle Ages. So some of you know, but I think it's the Battle of Crecy. You know, Welsh longbowmen can use their Longbows to kill French knights, like, you know, elite French knights, nobles, which is, like, horrible and depressing, because, you know, oh, my God, these long bowmen are commoners. Now, the issue was, like, Welsh, long bowmen require a lot of training. It's a very skilled enterprise. It's much more difficult than a crossbow. Once you start to have guns, like, you know, once you start to have cannons and guns and these other things, obviously, you know, the tide is gonna start to turn against cavalry. Now, cavalry still important as muskets and, you know, cavalry with like pistols are obviously still around down to the time of Napoleon and later. But what you're starting to see is a shift away from the feudal system almost immediately. Because if you're an elite nobleman, and you can get just shot from a distance by some peasant. What's the point investing in all the skill and all the all your wealth into this becoming a knight? And so, you know, some of the nobles began hunting a lot. I mean, they continued to hunt. And so, you know the last French king? Well, last French king from the revolution famously hunted almost every day. And so this is like a continuance of kind of practices that dated back to their, you know, horse mounted, Frankish ancestors, but because now they couldn't be knights of the field of battle, like superior against peasants, because the peasants now had guns. You see the same thing with the samurai in Tokugawa, Japan. The banning of guns really allowed the samurai to continue their mounted warrior way of life, whereas during the period where guns were introduced into Japan and used by these southern daimyo in particular, they were really leveling the playing field. And so the left there was a leveling now of horse, mounted horse, you know, armies and infantry, and it's kind of a shift back to, you know, maybe what you see the Roman Empire, where disciplined infantry can easily take on Horse Warriors. And so starting to see like a diminishment in the importance of of horses as the kind of key and primary tactical wing arm of the military, but they're still extremely important on the farm. So I just pointed out at the early on the podcast, the peak number of horses in the USA was 1920 but there were still many, many horses down to the depression and later, you know, basically, you know, automation takes time to be integrated. And horses, you know, horses are still extremely strong and powerful useful. Ox are about like, 50% stronger and a lot of things like plowing, but they're just not as active, easy to direct, and I guess, efficient as horses, even if, like you know, once you - if you ideally yoke them, they're good, right? But otherwise, there's some problems, I guess, compared to the horse. So you have Clydesdales, you have these workhorses, and uh, horse become more a matter of, uh, economic utility than military utility, as we're shifting from, say, 1500 to 1900 now there's horse are still used in World War One, obviously, but this is trench warfare. Now, the first tanks were invented, eventually, the last cavalry. There were some cavalry charges by the Polish army in 1939 against the Nazis, obviously didn't work out well, right? So, you know, this is the twilight of the horse. You have the Charge of the Light Brigade during the war with the Russians. You know the 1850s I think, so there's still some utility here, but they're not central anymore. Infantry, you know, mobile infantry, you know, men with rifles, with guns. You know, machine guns transform everything. The cannon. You know, this is also the period where the Eurasian steppe finally gets closed in terms of its military power. So the Mongols, as were kind of the apotheosis of mounted warriors going from Hungary all the way to Manchuria, south into India. And they peak around like, say, 12, 1300 1300 and you know, their empire is gone by 1400 but they're still actually like a powerful force on the steppe. They capture a Ming Emperor in like at the 1450 so Mongols at the Altan Khan, who's a descendant of Genghis Khan, are still very, very formidable in Mongolia. And then under the oirats, who were the Western Mongols. It's a different branch, not Genghis side. There was a new empire in the 17th century. They're interfering in Tibet. They're installing the Dalai Lama. They're fighting the Chinese. In the 18th century, there was a concerted genocide against the Oirats. It drove them into into Europe and Russia. So that's where the Kalmyks are along the Volga. Now, what happened is, under Catherine the great and the Manchu emperors, basically the steppe people, the oirats, the other step people were crushed between Russia and China, and it was mostly just like the emergence of cannon made it so that, you know, there was just no offensive way. There was no way that the steppe people could engage in offensive warfare anymore, effectively against these large empires and armies that could use the economic, economic power of these like mass settled states. And so what Qianlong did was it committed, committed genocide, because it's very hard to defeat a people on the move that keep retreating. But, you know, just like, burn the fields, or, like, you know, burn their grasslands, introduce disease, you can exterminate them that way. That's, that's kind of what happened. And you know, I want to contrast here who the steppe people were, versus settled people, and why they were so secure for a long time. And it's because, you know, industrial might was not brought to war in the same way until relatively recently. And the stuff, people didn't have numbers, they didn't have industry. But every single male, and even many of the females, as you know from Scythian Amazons were you could mobilize them as soldiers. And so the whole nation was a nation at arms, whereas with the civilized people, the Roman army was only like, at its peak, like a couple of percent. The Roman legions were a couple of percent of the Empire's population. Most people had to farm. They could not fight during much of the year because they had to, like, sow and harvest and take care of, you know, the main primary economic production. So farmers are just at a major disadvantage. Subtle societies are major disadvantage, even if they're 100th the 100 times larger population, it was extremely difficult for them to mobilize resources in a way, in a concerted way, to defend themselves against the repeated mobile lightning attacks of steppe peoples and so for well over 1000 years, for a couple of 1000 years, almost steppe Peoples could kind of attack at will and extract at will. And they did, and they had this massive, massive territory in the interior of Eurasia in which they retreated. And they did this all ended with modern mechanization, modernization. And you know, the horse was redundant, rendered redundant, but obviously, horse still has residents culturally, right? So horsepower
is 33,000 feet pounds of work per minute, right? So we're gonna have to use the term horsepower indefinitely. So horsepower is just like force and pounds, times distance in feet over time, in minutes, you know? So this is just like a term like acceleration or whatever, what we call it horsepower. Chomping at the bit is a term that comes from horses, where it's like you're impatient to do something. So horses are just just kind of moving, you know, being long in the tooth is again from horses. So, you know, there's a lot of idioms that don't make any sense unless you think about horses, Get off your high horse. So I'm gonna name some of them, get off your high horse, gift horse. You know, horses were gift. Eating like a horse, obviously, a dark horse, you know, you know, just like something kind of out of the blue, horse around. Now, that's because horses are very playful, you know, which I think we kind of know, Trojan horse. You know what that is. Horse sense. Probably, it's because horses have a good instincts about things. You know, they're fearful. Their flight is like triggers easily down to the wire, obviously. Is from horse racing. You know, all of these terms are like, out of - hold your horse also, by the way, like it's from carriages. You know, all these terms are going to be in our lexicon for kind of, like, I don't know, folders and computers. You know, folders in computers. So just like, go back to like, kind of like, summarize what I was talking about here. There's a lot of things, you know, ecology and evolution. In terms of, like, the evolutionary origins of the horse 20 million years ago. You know, they evolved 5 million years ago. But really, the spread of grasslands mean that, like, you know, you have to evolve this large creature with robust teeth that lived in herds that was social. You know, horses aren't smart, but they have social intelligence, so they're domesticable. There's some things with their anatomy and their size that allow them to be ridden. Unlike other animals who you know, like the spine is not strong enough, or you have to ride in their butt, also, they move up and down a lot. Horse do not so there's a lot of things related to horses that make them convenient and domesticable. There's multiple domestication attempts, in my opinion, between, say, 4000 BC, at 2200 BC, the Botai did one where they were basically like the Plains Indians use horses to hunt other horses and other, probably plains animals. Yamnaya probably used horses as ponies that they would ride. And, you know, tamed, tamed animals. Maybe they didn't have, like, too many excellent compliments of, like, you know, in terms of, like, saddles, stirrups, obviously not stirrups, but they didn't have, they didn't have metal bits, because, you know, metal working was very primary that time. The DOM2 lineage, the E. caballus lineage, the modern domestic horse really emerges 2200 BC from a Pontic horse in the Sintashta culture of the Southern Urals. They're the ones that have at the light Warhorse, the light war chariot, and that basically spreads that horse lineage all across the world immediately. These horses are still smaller than modern horses, but they are stronger. They're more coordinated. The evolutionary pressures of the genes are clear. There are more docile again, that is more clear. There's a new horse lineage that extirpates All the other horse lineages, and then there's a repeated evolution. The horses get bigger. They get big enough that men can ride them. Then that turns into cavalry, and then eventually cavalry gets good enough to dominate over infantry, and you basically have the age of the horse for about 1500 years, 1300 years as like the overwhelmingly dominant military force, until the re-emergence of certain technologies that make the horse redundant. And so then the horse has shifted mostly as a, quote, workhorse, which is still very important until the 20th century, in much of the world. And, you know, there's still millions of horses. There's wild horses, wild horses in Australia, there's wild horses in North America. I think domestication probably saved the horse from extinction. I think there's quite likely a possibility that eventually, you know, you know, let's say, like, we never this a weird alternative history, but we never domesticate the horse, and we invent guns, we would just eventually, like, shoot and eat all of the horses on the Eurasian steppe. So the horse are megafauna. They're an ice age megafauna that our ice age ancestors were painting on caves about. And now, you know, we have, we have so many of them all over the world, in large part because, you know, they're part of our culture as human beings. They're part of many societies, cultures, and so we can't imagine a world without them, like I looked it up, and they're probably like 60 million of wild horses in the world. So that's like one for every 120 people, about 10 million in the United States, 6 million in Mexico, 6 million
In China, 5 million in Brazil and three and a half million Argentina so you know the 400 breeds, big ones, little ones, show horses, work horses, obviously, racing horses like Secretariat, who had a massive, massive heart. So you know the age of the horse was over, but horses are still part of our culture. And I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and if you got this far, I think you know I will be writing an essay about horses and some of the things I've talked about here. So I hope you keep an eye out for that.
