I’ve just published a chapter called “Inventing the Wild Horse: the Manmade History of the Takhi and Tarpan from 1828–2018” in Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (Routledge, 2020). I went overboard writing this and outstripped my word count so …
Category Archives: Stone Age
The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot via the British Museum
How could you fit the history of horses and humans into a space? Not even the British Museum could hold it: it would be crammed like Tutankhamun’s tomb. Selene’s chariot horses on the eastern Parthenon pediment would be eyeball to eyeball with Da Vinci’s triple-life-size Spanish steed. The central atrium would be the tackroom to …
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If Wishes Were Horses: Hunters and Amazons
Here’s the Robin Hood Cave horse carving, safely at the British Museum. I drew heavily on the work of a husband and wife archaeology team for the section on the early domestication of the horse: you can find out about David W Anthony and Dorcas Brown’s Institute for Ancient Equestrian Studies here. You can find …
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The First Appaloosa
From The Local: An international team of researchers led by a German scientist believe they have found the first evidence that spotted horses, often seen depicted in cave paintings, actually existed tens of thousands of years ago. “We are just starting to have the genetic tools to access the appearance of past animals and there …
Was Saudi Arabia the Home of Horse Domestication?
Saudi archaeologists are challenging the new theory that the earliest solid evidence for horse domestication was found in north east Kazakhstan, among the relics of the Bronze Age Botai peoples. They believe that they’ve found traces of horse taming in al-Maqar, dating back 9,000 years – approx. 4,000 years older than the Botai material. This …
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