The Brethren of Purity were a secret group of Islamic philosophers based in Basra, Iraq sometime during the eighth or tenth centuries. So secretive were they that very little is known about them, but some of their writing survives, including a letter known as The Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of …
Continue reading “The Mule – and his Friends – Put Man on Trial”
In The Age of the Horse I gave readers some idea of the ingenuity humans used to recycle the bodies of horses used in the nineteenth century west. Of course, this inventiveness was not restricted to the Victorian era nor to the more rapidly industrialised nations – and we’re still finding new uses for …
Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wild Animal Research (IZW) in Berlin have announced a fascinating discovery in the history of gaited horses. By studying the genomes of ninety horses that lived between the Copper Age and the eleventh century, they have traced the spread of the fifth equine gait or amble. This …
Continue reading “Scandal! Did the Icelandic tölt come from England?”
