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Domestication Early human relationships with horses is evidenced in 50,000 year old sites in France where the fossils of nearly 10,000 horses were found at the base of a cliff. The animals were clearly driven over the cliff as the most efficient way of hunting them. It is the same method that was used by pre-Columbian Native Americans to hunt buffalo before they had access to horses to ride. As ancient Steppe dwellers were nomadic hunter/gatherers, the first domestication of horses most likely occurred when they were captured and used for pack animals. When societies settled to practice farming, there is archaeological evidence that horses were husbanded for meat and milk. While it has long been accepted that humans harnessed horses prior to riding them, new archeological evidence pushes the date for the first horseback riding back to approximately 4,000 BC with the discovery of soft-bit wear on the teeth of horses dated to 3500 BC in Kazakstan, which pushes the beginning of horse riding back to shortly after domestication - some 3,000 years prior to significant horseback riding in the "civilized" Near East.1 There is evidence in the
later Epipaleolithic sites in Egypt of a population explosion around 5500 BC,
possibly due to the development of true agriculture as well as animal
domestication. At this time, the area was covered in vast grasslands and
forests, an environment similar to that found in North
America 30 million years earlier that led to the evolution of the horse and now
provided an ideal breeding ground for Equus. Generation after generation began to notice
that it was raining less frequently and that there were fewer plants. The death
of the grasslands and forests slowly gave way to sand; in a few thousand years,
North Africa became "The Desert" ("Sahara" means
"desert" in Arabic). Human populations were pushed towards the south,
the MIddle East, and the Nile River. Like a solitary giant, the
Nile loomed as the only source of water in the growing desert; in a sea of sand,
the Nile was a thin sliver of green, growth, and life. The Scythians (southern Russian steppes) were unified as a group of nomadic horsemen with common customs and interests about 800 BC. They appeared for the first time in history during the 7th century BC, when they made an invasion into the Near East, riding as far south as Palestine. They occupied part of northern Iran for some 40 years.
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Although
carts came before the horse and were originally pulled by oxen and asses, the
four-wheeled war wagon depicted on the "Standard" from southern
Mesopotamia of about 2500 BC, is pulled by a yoked team of four equines with
nose-ring control. The horse was used primarily as a harness animal for
1,000 years. By 1500 BC, Egyptians invented the yoke saddle for their
chariot horses. Metal bits were first used in the Near East and Egypt
around this same time. Artifacts in King Tut's tomb (1350 BC) depict a
hunting scene of the young king shooting ostrich from his chariot, pulled by a
bitted brace of horses wearing yoke saddles.
