Academic Reading — All-Types Test 1

Reading passage

The domestication of the horse A The relationship between people and horses is now so familiar that it is easy to forget how recent, in the long span of human history, the animal's domestication actually is. Long after sheep, goats and cattle had been brought under human control, the horse remained a wild creature of the open grassland, hunted for its meat rather than harnessed for its strength. Only around five to six thousand years ago, on the wide plains that stretch across what is today southern Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, did herders begin the slow process of taming it. That achievement, modest as it may seem beside the pyramids or the wheel, would eventually reshape trade, warfare and the movement of peoples across three continents. B Working out when and where horses were first tamed has proved unusually difficult, because the earliest changes left few obvious traces. A domesticated horse does not differ from a wild one as sharply as a dog differs from a wolf, and bones alone rarely settle the question. Researchers have therefore looked for subtler clues. At the settlement of Botarel, excavators found horse teeth bearing a distinctive band of wear, of a kind produced when an animal repeatedly mouths a bit. Elsewhere, chemical residues clinging to the inside of ancient pots suggested that the people there were drinking mare's milk, something only possible if the herds were tame enough to be milked. A separate line of evidence has come from the animals' own genetic record: comparisons of ancient and modern samples indicate that the horses ridden today descend overwhelmingly from a single population that expanded rapidly out of the western steppe, displacing other lineages as it went. Taken together, such findings pushed the likely date of domestication back several centuries earlier than scholars had once assumed, and narrowed its probable birthplace to a surprisingly compact region. C The advantages a tamed horse offered were considerable, though they were not felt all at once. In the earliest phase, the animal was probably valued chiefly as a walking larder: a source of meat and milk that, unlike cattle, could paw through winter snow to reach the grass beneath and so survive the harsh months with little tending. Only later did people grasp its potential for transport. A rider could watch over far larger herds than a person on foot, and could cross in a single day distances that would previously have taken the best part of a week. Communities that adopted the horse thus gained a decisive edge over their neighbours, and the practice spread outwards from the grassland heartland with surprising speed. Herders could now drive their flocks to distant pastures and return before the weather turned, opening up tracts of dry land that had been all but useless to people travelling on foot. D It was the marriage of the horse to the wheel, however, that transformed its military and economic significance. Early carts were heavy and slow, but by around 2000 BC craftsmen had learned to build the light, spoked chariot, a vehicle nimble enough to carry archers into battle at speed. Chariots became the prestige weapon of the age, and the demand for horses to draw them rippled through the economies of the ancient Near East. Kingdoms that could breed or buy the best animals held a clear advantage, and treaties of the period record horses being sent as tribute and as gifts between rulers, a sign of just how precious they had become. Manuals were even composed setting out in painstaking detail how chariot horses should be fed, exercised and conditioned, the earliest surviving guides to the care of any domesticated animal. E The lasting legacy of that first domestication is hard to overstate. For the better part of four thousand years, until the coming of the railway and the motor car, the horse remained the fastest means by which a message, an army or a cargo could travel overland. Empires were held together by riders carrying dispatches along relays of fresh mounts; fields were ploughed, mines drained and canals dug with horsepower in the most literal sense. That a handful of herders on a distant steppe should have set all this in motion is a reminder that the most far-reaching innovations are not always the ones that seem grandest at the time.