Horses were way ahead of the internet: A history lesson

New book tells how the animals helped shape human history.

Horses have been likened to “an ancient internet”, for their role in early globalisation.

People on horseback and in wagons spread into new territories, new environments or along new trade routes, all of which brought about widespread and revolutionary shifts in culture.

This is according to William T Taylor, author of a new book called Hoof Beats: How Horses Have Shaped Human History.

Taylor, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains how horses and humans are entwined throughout history and neither could have thrived without the other.

After mankind learnt to ride the animals – for trade, war and sport – the world opened up and foreign things were experienced. By the second millennium BC, horses had moved people, goods, languages and technologies into areas they’d not been before.

“Horses are kind of like an ancient internet,” concludes the author in an interview with the Observer newspaper in the UK.

Genghis Khan and his army

Taylor does a lot of his research while riding in the wilds of Mongolia, one of the few places where there are more horses than people and where people and horses still have a close relationship.

“Almost the whole archaeological record is intertwined with horses in some important way, and … the role of Mongolia in the human-horse story has been largely omitted from the story told so far,” he says.

The Observer provides background: “Mongolia, a Buddhist nation between Russia and China, is perhaps most famous for the marauding horseback Mongol hordes led by warlord Genghis Khan in the 12th century. Khan commanded the largest land empire in human history, using vast and exclusively horseback armies of expert archers: they were the world’s most mobile and deadly military unit.

“Khan united the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian Steppe and conquered much of central Asia and China. At their peak, the Mongols controlled an area about the size of Africa – thanks, in the main, to their deep knowledge of the horse. Khan’s invasions were brutal and genocidal, but he also abolished torture, forged new trade routes and even created the first international postal system. It was an era of unprecedented globalisation: of ideas, objects, and people, all horse-powered.”

Horseback riding

The search for artefacts exploring horse and human contact has unearthed objects as rare as they are bizarre: the first documented human faeces in the Americas, more than 14,000 years old, were found at Paisley Caves, Oregon, alongside horse bones. The oldest known pair of trousers, 3,000 years old, were designed for and worn by an early horse rider. These were found at a tomb in Yanghai in China in 2014.

Magical finds in Mongolia include monumental standing stones encircling sacrificed horse skeletons, hollow eyes facing the rising sun, buried in full tack alongside their owners and their chariots.

Other artefacts have been extracted from deep inverse pyramidal burial grounds in the country’s frozen high plains – the world’s oldest evidence of mounted horseback riding. In 2016 a fully intact 2,000-year-old wood-framed saddle with iron stirrups was found in a tomb.

The Observer interview ends with Taylor in raptures about horseback riding. “It’s one of the purest ways to understand not just an animal and not just the landscape, but also yourself. It really is transcendent … that moment of pure connection between rider and horse. When I go someplace new, and I’m trying to get a sense of the landscape, riding horses is one of the purest ways to do it, because you feel it rather than know it. You can academically read about things for a long time, but that experience is incredibly important.”

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