Pity the poor archaeologists who lie on their bellies in sand or mud and painstakingly dust off bits of fossilized wood or bone, ceramics or metal scraps. It is, however, from their patient work that scientific truth progresses. Our understanding of the natural history of the horse has galloped ahead in the 21st century. As late as 1996, a scholarly book on Arabian horses could claim Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of this animal.
In 2023, Nature magazine published an article about the geographic origin and chronology of the modern domestic horse. The authors decoded the DNA of all known ancient horse remains, to identify Equus caballus as a native of the Pontic Steppe (north of the Black Sea). In recent years teams of archaeologists also conclusively disproved all other theories of the horse’s origins. William Taylor participated in many of these teams, and so brings to his history a vivid sense of discovery, as well as the patience and the precision of his profession.
The literature on the origin of horses has been filled with myths and theories that have proven difficult to dispel.
The literature on the origin of horses has been filled with myths and theories that have proven difficult to dispel. Besides the fact that national pride has located the origin of the horse in different countries, not only Arabia, but also Spain, China and Anatolia. Earlier theories linked the rise of horsemanship to the spread of Indo-European languages westward into Europe and eastward into the marches of China. So argued David Anthony in his widely-read book from 2008, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. Anthony’s thesis depended on dating the domestication of horses and the capability to ride them to the 3rd or 4th millennium BCE. Scholars spent over a decade debating the evidence of horse riding at various sites in western Siberia and Central Asia, with teeth wear, gender distribution of bones, and milk fat residues mustered as evidence for or against an earlier or later date for riding.
As Taylor demonstrates, this debate required scholars to use the most advanced scientific approaches for making their cases. Carbon dating had become common already in the 1970s, but researchers learned how isotopes influenced, for example, by fish diets, can result in readings being off by a thousand years, and require appropriate recalibration. Similarly, researchers in one of Taylor’s teams used lasers to identify differences in collagen remains to determine which horse subspecies was present. These newer, more rigorous techniques eventually forced a rethink in the chronology proposed by Anthony’s book.
Another narrative challenged by one of Taylor’s missions is the introduction of Spanish horses among the Plains Indians of America. The received story relates that the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 expelled the Spanish from New Mexico and Arizona and left horses in the hands of the local peoples. Taylor’s fieldwork shows significant remains of horses in indigenous settlements a century earlier. This earlier date of adoption explains better the extraordinary horsemanship of the Plains Indians as reported by 18th century European travelers, though it does not comfort the Amerindians’ own tradition of indigenous horses, who went extinct in North America 10,000 years earlier. Taylor is, nevertheless, respectful of local traditions, and tells fascinating stories about how horses became part of indigenous cultures wherever they were introduced, in the Pampas, South Africa, Timor and even Australia.
Mongolia, with its cold winters and lack of agricultural settlements proves to be the promised land of equine archaeology.
Some stories are easier to dismiss, while others are harder to prove. Taylor shows there is no evidence for horses in the Harappa civilization. This undermines a belief, dear to many Hindu fundamentalists, that the Vedic scriptures with their rich and detailed horse rituals, emerged in that ancient civilization. On the other hand, he also points out that evidence for horses in the Aryan era of Indian history, to which most scholars attribute the Vedas, while not missing, is surprisingly scarce. India has not been kind to horse remains.
Mongolia, with its cold winters and lack of agricultural settlements proves to be the promised land of equine archaeology, with many layers of history narrating the progress of horsemanship, from domestication, to chariot riding, to mounted combat, each stage of which Taylor meticulously documents and explains.
Mongolia is also an excellent vantage point from which to examine the two major historical narratives of the horse—the rivalry between steppe-based and agriculture-based dynasties for control of China. This started with the Zhou (ca 1046 BCE-256 BCE) and only really ended with the downfall of the Qing in 1912. The other narrative is, of course, Genghis Khan’s conquest of much of the old world, which Taylor sees as being heavily influenced by climatic changes, positive for the grass and horse power of the Mongols, deleterious for the farmers of the sown lands.
As Taylor moves from the realm of archaeology to that of general history, readers may detect a decline in rigor. For example, he relates that the armies of Islam rode horses together with dromedaries during their early conquests, while other scholars argue that they only developed cavalry after the fall of the Iranian empire.
This eminently readable, patiently argued, and insightful history of horses will delight and instruct readers, even those who have never felt the pull of saddle leather and horse sweat. It provides the best summary to date of our ever increasing scientific knowledge of the horse and its interaction with our own species, and shows the debt we owe scholars like Taylor who have spent their lives traveling across the globe to lie on their bellies looking for the tiniest scraps of the past.