Current Events > Why Horses Were not domesticated until 6K years ago

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Archeologists say that the horse was domesticated 6,000 years ago and part of this theory is that the horse riders overrode the local languages and established Indo European.

Why did it take so long?

My guess is economy and infrastructure. I am guessing that if you are galloping around on a horse both it and you need a calorie intense diet which needs some underlings to get the food together. If you are on a subsistence level sooner or later the horse gets too weak to be ridden.

I am guessing that horses were tamed and ridden long before they were domesticated.

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They were tamed long before they were ridden; horses work well as pack animals, yet art and historical sources seem to suggest they weren't being ridden for war or pleasure for awhile aka the art depicts them being sat on weirdly and such. Everything was tamed before it was used, but they'd have been domesticated before riding for sure. Chariots alone seem to suggest that considering their prevalence archaeologically.

They're probably severely undershooting all those estimates based on factual data and historical record. We can be fairly certain wolves/dogs were first because they've evolved separately for so long, and they aid in the domestication of the rest. We've found ruins of cities older than those estimates and I highly doubt we had cities before domesticating dogs.

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It's so weird to me that Human civilization is only a fraction of the time humans have existed. We spent so much time in the stone age

Zikten posted...

It's so weird to me that Human civilization is only a fraction of the time humans have existed. We spent so much time in the stone age

We seem some reflections of it in socio-cultural wisdom and knowledge, both positive and negative. We have the post-roman collapse and then the burning of the library at alexandria etc, meanwhile the east is barely affected, they're just too busy bothering with steppe people during a huge chunk of time or warring with themselves.

Basically living memory is huge, and written memory is... huger. The ability to retain information across lifetimes outside of genetic memory is beyond remarkable, it's unheard of in the animal kingdom until the homo genus and similar offshoots.

They think we've had fire for over a million years... and that trips me out more than anything, because judging by discoveries, it was probably around for longer than that.

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Why were we in the stone age for so long? I want to know too.

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because starting from scratch is hard work

The predecessor of the domestic horse migrated over the land bridge into Eurasia and was hunted into extinction in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse

My guess is that learning how to store food for winter and droughts was major in domesticating horses. The other step seems to be taming a stallion that could be managed. Before this event of taming a stallion herders most likely took their mares to wild stallions for breeding.


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CobraGT posted...

Why were we in the stone age for so long? I want to know too.

Pretty much the same reason other species are still in the stone age (aside from humanity being the dominant species on this planet). A species needs to jump certain hurdles in order to thrive and develop, in form of crucial inventions, or environmental changes that benefit it.

I recently took the time to scroll through this:
https://xkcd.com/1732/

Major developments are pretty far apart at first, until a few crucial inventions come to pass, and those developments are instrumental in bringing about other developments at an exponential rate.
But when you get to the bottom of that pic, one can't help but wonder if that's really all for the best?

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I would like to say that fired pottery and the ability to store food preceded the domestication of the horse. While fire pottery was produced before the horse was domesticated, it does not seem that the cultures domesticating the horse had fired pottery. However, having horses gave the horse cultures of the Great Steppes the means to acquire the preserved food so there is an element of truth in this theory.

I think that what is missing from my theory is that at the beginning of domestication, the culture needed to dedicate itself to the task of managing horses.

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This whole topic is driving me wild. This is probably one of my favorite subjects. Its thrilling.

You guys ever watched the documentary 'How beer saved the world'

A potential argument for the agrarian revolution that happens offscreen could very well be to grow plants to make beer/alcohol. It was without a doubt one of the world's first commodities aside from food so it makes a lot of sense there. The ancient egyptians were brewing it, and they've even found remnants of antibiotics in the pots used to store it; the way they were preparing it LITERALLY made beer a medicine and it's reproducible today. Just a fun tidbit :)

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