Among 5,000-year-old human remains in central Europe, researchers discovered the oldest direct evidence of horseback riding, a discovery that would change history.
“When you get on a horse and ride it fast, it’s a thrill – I’m sure ancient humans felt the same way,” said David Anthony, a co-author of the study and Hartwick College researcher. “Horseback riding was the fastest a human could go before the railroads.
Researchers examined over 200 Bronze Age skeletal remains in museum collections
Researchers examined over 200 Bronze Age skeletal remains in museum collections in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for symptoms of what co-author and University of Helsinki anthropologist Martin Trautmann refers to as “horse rider syndrome” – six tell-tale markings that show a person was likely riding an animal, including typical wear marks on the hip sockets, thigh bone, and pelvis.
“Bones can be read like biographies,” said Trautmann, who has previously researched comparable wear patterns in skeletons from later periods when horseback riding is well-documented in history.
The researchers concentrated on human remains, which are more easily preserved than horse bones at burial sites and museums, and discovered five possible riders who lived between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago and belonged to the Yamnaya, a Bronze Age culture.
“There is earlier evidence for harnessing and milking of horses, but this is the earliest direct evidence so far for horseback riding,” said Alan Outram, a researcher at the University of Exeter who was not engaged with the research but applauded the method.
The findings were published in the journal Science Advances on Friday. Domesticating wild horses on Eurasia’s plains was a process, not a singular event, according to the experts.
Researchers had previously discovered evidence of individuals drinking horse milk in dental remains, as well as evidence of horses controlled by harnesses and bits dating back more than 5,000 years, although this does not necessarily imply the horses were ridden.
Yamnaya civilization evolved in what is now Ukraine and western Russia
The Yamnaya civilization, notable for its distinctive burial mounds, evolved in what is now Ukraine and western Russia, an area known as the Pontic Caspian steppe. The horses they kept were different from modern horses in that they were more readily frightened and less tolerant of humans, but they may have been the immediate genetic progenitors of modern horses, which appeared a few years later, according to the researchers.
According to Volker Heyd, a University of Helsinki researcher, and co-author, the Yamnaya are most notable because of their remarkable expansion throughout Eurasia in only a few generations, going westward to Hungary and eastward to Mongolia.
“The spread of Indo-European languages is linked to their movement, and they reshaped the genetic makeup of Europe,” he said.
According to the experts, their bond with horses may have contributed to this amazing action. “Horses expand the concept of distance – you begin to think about places previously out of reach as being reachable,” said co-author Anthony, the Hartwick College researcher.
This doesn’t prove that the Yamnaya were horseback fighters
That doesn’t mean the Yamnaya were horseback fighters, he says, because the horses they rode were probably too nervous for stressful battlefield settings. Horses, on the other hand, may have helped the Yamnaya to deliver communications more effectively, form alliances, and manage the herds of cattle that were vital to their economy.
Because only a small percentage of the skeletons studied showed all six markers of horseback riding, “it seems that a minority of the people at that time were riders – that does not suggest that a whole society was built on horseback riding,” said molecular researchers Ludovic Orlando of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, who was not involved in the research. Yet, he applauded the effort for aiding in the identification of the possible origins of equestrian riding.
“This is about the origins of something that impacted human history as only a few other things have,” said Orlando.