Category Archives: Horses

Bit wear and Prehistory

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As a budding historian, I think books and written records are pretty awesome.  Written records in particular are pretty great because that’s is what history is really.  History began when people started writing things down, and everything before is lost in the mists of prehistory, ultimately unknowable.

That’s what I used to think, anyway.  This week’s readings, among other things, changed the way I think about the supremacy of the written word.  Archaeology lends so much insight into early human populations.  Actually analyzing animal bones and charred seeds and what they mean is a little beyond me, but I can recognize the insight they can give.  I think one of the most interesting aspects was how bones can tell the age and gender of animals in a settlement and this in turn can tell whether the bones came from wild or domestic horses.  This is obviously important for determining when people domesticated horses.

Bit wear is incredibly interesting, and the fact that it so recently became studied is interesting to me.  As someone completely ignorant about horses and bits and such things, it seems pretty obvious that sticking a piece of metal in a horses mouth would change the horse’s teeth.  The matter is not so cut and dry as it appears though.  Assuming that bits do cause ware, so much can be gleaned from old horse teeth.  The question of where horse back riding originated can be answered by bit wear patterns on teeth.  The question of where it spread can be answered by the same thing.  It seems like such a small thing, a bit of ware on an old tooth, but it can tell us so much about early humans and the domesticated animals around us.

Linguistics are another source that can tell us a great deal about the movement of peoples before there were written records.  Again, the specifics of it go mostly over my head, but I trust that people smarter than I can trace how Indo-European languages developed over the years and can figure out what this means in terms of early humans.  And from what I understand, so much information can be derived from language.  We already knew this though.  As Kessler taught us, we experience vestiges of age old pastoralism in our language every day.  Language is so central to our lives and can tell us so much about our past.

I suppose part of this class was about looking at history before the written word made everything so easy.  There’s so much evidence about early humans and their animals if we know how to look.  As a historian, it has been so interesting to learn so much about a time that I, like so many others, think of as being prehistory.

Animal Studies

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There were so many good papers and interesting, accomplished people at the Living With Animals Conference at Eastern Kentucky University! One rarely finds such a collegial, kind, smart, and diverse group coming together around anything — much less the issue of animals in the academy.  So this meeting was truly a treat. I definitely can’t do the whole experience justice in this post, so I’ll just touch on the highlights: Every session I attended kept me riveted for the duration.  A “Living with Horses” session on Thursday addressed the subtle and profound issues of helping people and horses who fall on hard times through Equine Rescue services, as well as the changing paradigms and ethics of enlisting horses in therapeutic interventions for humans. The third paper in this session used Jane Smiley’s work, especially her fiction for juveniles, to consider the ways children and horses both function as “live property” in the contemporary United States.

Friday began with a wonderfully rich and entertaining presentation by Margo DeMello, about teaching “Human-Animal Studies.”  This theme carried over to the session where I talked about our blogging project. I also learned about how to incorporate animal studies into a first-year seminar with a service-learning component, how the occupational  therapy program at Eastern Kentucky University engages a broad spectrum of learners (and horses), and how inquiry-based learning (using the Project Dragonfly QUEST model) can be used in an animal ethics course. The afternoon was devoted to Animal Subjectivity.  Pamela Ashmore’s presentation raised many troubling questions about the often noble goals and incredibly high physical and monetary costs of taking non-human primates into the home as “pets.”  Even more confounding, was Lynn White Miles’ paper about the thirty year journey of Chantek the baboon from research subject to enculturated child, back to research subject, and then (currently) to exhibition object (at the Atlanta Zoo).

The highlight of the day was a round table session about setting up Animal Studies programs featuring Bob Mitchell, conference organizer and founder of the Animal Studies major at EKU. This is the first major of its kind, and will produce its first graduates this spring.  The curriculum is rigorous, practical and elegantly balanced: Students develop in-depth competence in Arts and Humanities (courses such as Animals in History, Animal Ethics, Cultural Anthropology), they gain a solid footing in the sciences with coursework in zoology, ecology, comparative psychology, human evolution, etc., and they complete an “applied” concentration in conservation, animal science, and animals and the law.  Capstone coursework and options for field study and study abroad provide the flexibility and focus for an academic experience grounded in the three major elements of Animal Studies: study of the animal, study of human interactions with animals, and study of relationships between animals and people.

I had to leave mid-day on Saturday to avoid driving through the spring snow storm that swept off the flatland and into our mountains this morning.  I hated to miss the tour of the Kentucky Horse Park today, but was grateful for the chance to hear Ken Shapiro’s final keynote about the future of Human-Animal Studies and some very compelling papers before heading home. These included Jessica Bell’s analysis of how the new “naturalization” of the circus in major media outlets invokes discourses of conservation, animal protection, and domestication to legitimize the exploitation of animals, especially elephants. Jeannette Vaught’s presentation on the connection between commercial horse slaughter and private horse cloning raised a host of issues, none of which sit easily with popular conceptions of equine sport, biomedical advances, and the monetary “value” of individual horses.  The shifting sands on which equine capital is evaluated and which determine the fate of race horses at the end of their career received nuanced and sophisticated analysis from Tamar Victoria Scoggin-McKee, whose fieldwork with Thoroughbred Ex-Racehorse Rescue promises to produce a fabulous dissertation.

Scoggin-McKee also provided a thorough update on the conference via Twitter (#livingwithanimalseku).

Asses, Horses, Bits, and Chariots

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Disclaimer: Like I said in class last week, I am generally very comfortable talking about sex. I want to study reproductive physiology in graduate school, and a prerequisite for studying in that area is the ability to say the words penis and vagina in any situation without flinching. I’m not trying to be vulgar or flippant, I just think it is easier to talk about something directly than to skirt around the topic.

Discussion questions are bold-ed throughout. Apologies to Erica for stealing this excellent format. Alex is my co-discussion leader–his blog should have additional questions.

I am not sure why Bulliet is so enthused about beastiality. Perhaps enthused is the wrong word, but it keeps coming back up. Honestly, from Bulliet’s descriptions in this section of the reading, it sounds as though beastiality really was not frowned upon in the same way it is today. Particularly compelling was his description of the Greek myth involving the girl who fell in love with Lucius in his donkey form and is disappointed when he returns to his man form. This would not be OK in our society. Why do you think that beastiality was so much more acceptable then than it is now? Bulliet would say that it was due entirely to the close proximity in which humans and animals lived. Do you agree? Do you have other ideas?

They penis, especially the donkey penis, was apparently a very powerful symbol. My first thought about why this might be related to the size of a donkey penis–it is as long and thick as a child’s arm. However, in ancient Greek art, people are often depicted with very small penises, presumably because was thought of as good. Why were donkey penises so important? Why was the penis such a powerful symbol? We laugh about phallic imagry today, but is the penis still also an important symbol in our society?  For some excellent wikipedia-ing, go to this page. Slightly, but not exactly, relevant to this course and really weird and hilarious reading.

Bulliet postulates that donkeys may originally have been domesticated for religious purposes or because of some sort of religious regard. Although initially I thought that this was absurd, it is indeed the case that cattle, sheep, and goats are better sources of meat and milk that donkeys are. Additionally, Bulliet suggests that you wouldn’t want to use an undomesticated animal as a beast of burden–strapping your valuables to it, only to have it run off. This argument is compelling, but it is the case that (even today) draft animals are trained by harnessing them to something so heavy that they cannot run off. Donkeys could have originally been tamed in this way. How reasonable is the theory that donkeys were tamed and them domesticated for religious reasons? Do you have an alternate theory?

Donkeys were regarded well and even respected and worshiped in ancient history. However, by the time that Shakespeare was writing his famous plays, the idea of the “dumb ass” has appeared. Why did this idea appear and what has caused it to persist?

Ah, the utility of categories. According to David W. Anthony in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, archaeologists can’t exactly agree on when the Bronze Age started, but generally think that it started in different places at different times. Later in chapter 7, Anthony discusses horizons. A horizon is a very broad trend, such as the t-shirt-and-jeans trend begining in the 1960s and 70s. Do we need “Bronze Age” (or other categories) as a classification? Why is it useful to classify historical eras in this way, if we can’t classify them across the board or agree on exactly how we ought to classify them? Are horizons more useful than absolute categories?

Radiocarbon dating revolutionized the study of ancient anthropology and archaeology, but also was met with much uncertainty and mistrust, because modifications and improvements in the procedure could (and did, on a couple of occasions) prove all previous results results incorrect. I had never really thought, before, about how historians feel about using various scientific technologies. As a scientist (or at least, a “wanna-be”!), I am used to the idea that a new technology–one that could dramatically change my field and even the significance of many earlier studies–could appear at basically any time. However, unless I am wildly mistaken, historians work with fairly reliable and unchanging resources (basically, stuff that has already happened) and could find a new scientific technology to be very untrustworthy and unpredictable. Not a criticism in either direction, just a thought I had. What does this mean for interdisciplinarity? Where else do you think that science and history can benefit from working together?

And now, we reach the portion of the reading that is highly relevant to my own interests: the domestication of the horse, for riding. Imagine the thought process of those first riders. What would it be like to get on a horse (a very fast, strong animal), for the very first time, when no one had eve done it before? Could that horse have been compromised in some way (injured or ill), to keep it from running away? Anthony was the first person to seriously study bit-wear patterns on horses teeth as a way of determining when riding originated. Initially, he was told that a properly fitting bit would not affect tooth wear at all. However, he pursued the idea further and found that there are distinctive patterns of tooth wear for horses that have been bitted regularly and, in fact, even soft bits made of materials like leather and hemp create wear patterns.

(Relevant only to my own interests: I would have loved to be involved in the portion of the study in which wear pattern on horses bitted with soft bits was examined. Four horses were ridden exclusively in 4 different non-metal bits for 150 hours each. Soft bit are not used in any modern riding disciplines. The horse trainer in my asks: how did the training process work? How did the horses respond? was it easier to to get these horses to “go in a frame”–or work with their necks and backs arched and noses tucked in–than it generally is? We don’t have to discuss these in class, but I think that they are interesting questions.)

My main concern about this system is that it assumes that the first horses ridden were ridden with some sort of bit. Riding horses with no bit, in a type of bridle known as a hackamore, is very common, even today, in many disciplines. Speaking from personal experience, I can say that it is much easier to teach a young horse the basics of steering and stopping with a rider aboard in a hackamore. However, the goals of early riding were probably very different than those today. Horses were certainly less tame and control was a higher priority than cooperation. However, as Anthony states, lack of bit wear patterns really say nothing about whether riding occurred. What did you all think about the bit wear patterns? What do you think about this type of measure–a measure that only tells you when something did happen, and not when something did not happen?

I saw many parallels between the domestication of horses and the domestication of reindeer. Did you all see these parallels? Why might this pattern of riding the animals you eat have appears in reindeer and horses, but not in the other large (ride-able) domesticates?

Anthony explains a theory of the original domestication of horses (for food) based upon genetic data. This theory suggests that the original population of domesticated horses originated from a population with one single foundation stallion and 70-80 mares. What do you think of this theory? Does it make sense based upon the logistics of keeping and breeding horses?

Behavior and temperament are highly heritable in horses (I speak from personal experience and from knowledge gained in genetics courses in my major). Additionally, stallions (even modern, domesticated ones) are really a pain to deal with. Therefore, I do not find the idea that people would only have kept a single, docile stallion and bred him to many mares to be a particularly surprising one. This begs the question, when did castration of horses appear? How did it revolutionize horse breeding? Geldings (castrated male horses) are well known today as the easiest-going, most trainable riding and driving horses.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about chariots and driving, discussed in the final chapter. We can only assume that chariots came about after horses were used to pull heavy loads, because horses are prey animals and will run away from something that they perceive is chasing them–like a large, clattering chariot, fast-moving chariot–until they get used to it. As I discussed above, an effective strategy for training horses to pull is to hitch them to to something too heavy to move. Were the first chariot horses also draft horses that were used to pulling loads? What was the advantage of the chariot over riding?

 

Also, here‘s one of my favorite poems. It’s about learning to ride, but it could almost be about getting on a horse for the very first time.

Drink Your Kumis – Or Fermentation as Humanity’s Best Friend

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The discussion about Erica’s terrific post about (among other things) milk and the Mayan apocalypse reminds me that fermented beverages are important, not just to the social lives of contemporary college students, but to the ancient and enduring practices of pastoralism on the Eurasian steppe.  For many people of Turkic and Mongol origin, kumis an alcoholic beverage made from fermented mare’s milk was (and still is) a dietary staple.

For those of you who are wondering about the logistical challenges of milking mares, here is captivating, contemporary account. mare milking in Kirgyzstan

(BTW, the foal in this image has the same kind of leopard spotting found in the Pech Merl image on our mother blog!) And fear not, city dwellers, and others who don’t have access to their own mares, can also imbibe kumis from a bottle.

Kumis bottle with glassKumis’s relative from the Caucasus, kefir, is made from goat, cow or sheep’s milk, and I have fond memories of scouring the stores of Moscow for it in the hungry days of the collapse of Communism.

Kefir cartonUrbanization and industrialization did cause many problems in terms of maintaining a supply of healthy milk. It’s doubtful that we would have traded beer for kumis, even without the advent of Pasteurization, but it’s worth remembering that Ghengis Khan’s warriors drank their kumis.

Creating questions

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Why and when and how exactly did domestication happen?

This week’s readings were about creating questions more than they were about answering them. In reality, we do not know how exactly animals came to be domesticated.

In Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers (for initial discussion of this work, see last week’s post), Bulliet argues that domestication happened as much because of religion, ritual, and sacrifice as because of a need for food. I find this to be highly improbable.The arguments in our first set of readings, describing domestication as a mutualism that developed almost naturally seems liker to me. How could religion and sacrifice take precedence over food procurement? Central to Bulliet’s argument is the suggestion that human males would be reluctant to give up hunting in favor of domesticating animals. I do not think that this is a reasonable supposition. Domestication was as favorable for the species domesticed as it was for

Bulliet’s argument for the use of animals for riding and heavy work is much more probable. I have ridden horses since I was little, and it seems very natural to me that humans would use animals for transport and heavy work. However, I do wonder how the initial riding or plowing training was done. I have broke horses to ride. The first time you get on an individual domestic horse is a little frightening–you don’t know quite how it will react. How frightening must it have been to mount a horse for the first time ever? What circumstances allowed for this to happen?

I do know that it was common practice among cowboys in the 1800s to bring colts in off of the range (2 and 3 year old horses that had rarely been handled), knock them down and castrate them (without any kind of anesthetic) and then get them up and ride them. Though this was traumatic for the young horses, it made the breaking to ride process much easier, because the colts were thinking harder about how much their surgery cuts hurt than they were thinking about how weird it was to have a person riding them. I wonder if a similar process allowed people to ride horses for the first time? Could people have initially gotten on a sick or hurt animal that would have a harder time hurting them?

In general, the arguments presented in Clutton-Brock’s Animals as Domesticates seem much more probable and reasonable to my mind than are Bulliet’s. Clutton-Brock uses a much more even-handed tone than Bulliet does–she is not passing wisdom down from on high, as Bulliet sometimes sounds like he is, but rather is presenting information that she has gathered from a variety of sources. I was interested to learn (after I had finished the reading) that she is in the zoology department at her university–apparently I have a bias towards the writing of those in fields similar to my own.

In particular, Clutton-Brock’s description of humans as nurturers was very compelling and I would like to hear her expand upon it. Humans care for their own young and for the young of other humans. The common saying “it takes a village to raise a child” really expresses this–culturally, we are OK with other people raising our children and with raise children for others. A clear modern-day example of this is human’s tendency to take their children to daycare centers. We aren’t really raising our own children in today’s society.

However, to return to the original point: humans are nurturers and we (today, at least) nurture our animals like we nurture our own young. People refer to their dogs or cats as their “children” and to themselves as their dogs’ “moms” and “dads.” It isn’t too large a jump, then, to imagine that early humans were more likely to want to care for another species than, say, early chimpanzees. Ingold touches on this point also, but in a slightly different sort of way, saying that hunters knew and cared for their prey in much the same way that they knew and cared for their fellow humans. Could humans have domesticated animals because of some sort of nurturing instinct over which we have no control?

Overall, these readings do not explain how domestication happened. Rather, they show that we do not know how it happened, exactly, and we really never will know, because history has happened–we can’t go back and check to see how it happened. Ingold sums up my opinion on the matter very eloquently in the introduction to his essay From Trust to Domination:

“Only humans… construct narratives of this history. Such narratives range from what we might regard as myths of totemic origin to supposedly ‘scientific’ accounts of the origins of domestication. And however we might choose to distinguish between myth and science, if indeed the distinction can be made at all, they have in common that they tell us as much about how the narrators view their own humanity as they do about their attitudes and relations to non-human animals. “

Every story we tell about how domestication happened is just that–a story. We do not know how exactly domestication happened and we never will. We can only theorize. I am beginning to realize that history is a discipline with many more questions than answers. In the study of history, you get a finite amount of evidence from which you must draw conclusions and, depending on who you are, those conclusions can vary widely.