Academic Reading — All-Types Test 15

Reading passage

The Domestication of the Horse Few partnerships have shaped human history as profoundly as the one between people and the horse. Yet the origins of that relationship remain surprisingly difficult to reconstruct. Horses do not fossilise their behaviour, and a single bone tells us little about whether the animal it came from was hunted, herded, milked or ridden. For much of the twentieth century, scholars placed the taming of the horse somewhere on the open grasslands of Central Asia, but the precise where and when were matters of educated guesswork rather than firm evidence. The difficulty is that the earliest domestic horses were physically almost identical to their wild cousins; selective breeding for size and temperament came much later, so archaeologists cannot simply measure a skeleton and declare it tame. The evidence for domestication is therefore indirect, pieced together from many small signs rather than read off a single decisive find in the ground. Recent decades have changed that picture considerably. Excavations at a settlement on the northern steppe, associated with a culture known to specialists as the Botarian complex, have yielded clues that a single bone could never provide. The teeth of horses recovered there show a distinctive pattern of wear on the second premolar, the tooth that sits just where a bit would rest in a horse's mouth. Modern experiments confirm that a hard mouthpiece, whether of bone, horn or rope, leaves exactly this kind of bevelling over time. The inference is cautious but powerful: these animals were being bridled, and an animal that is bridled is an animal that is controlled by a human hand. Pottery from the same site added a second, independent line of evidence. Chemical analysis of residues absorbed into the clay revealed fatty compounds characteristic of mare's milk. Since a wild mare will not tolerate milking, the presence of such residues implies a herd tame enough to be handled daily, and a people who had learned to exploit horses while they were still alive rather than merely eating them once dead. Milk, hide, traction and transport together made the horse far more valuable on the hoof than in the cooking pot. The economic logic of keeping rather than killing may have been the quiet turning point on which the whole domestication story rests. Why the steppe, and why then? The grasslands offered a decisive advantage that other regions could not match. Unlike cattle or sheep, horses can use their hooves to break through winter snow and reach the frozen grass beneath, so a herd could feed itself through months when other livestock would simply starve. A community that could keep horses alive over a hard winter possessed a mobile, self-sustaining reserve of food and muscle that walked to market on its own legs. This capacity to survive the lean season, more than any deliberate act of taming, may explain why the horse was first mastered here and not in the warmer lands to the south. Once the animal could be ridden, the human world expanded at a stroke. A rider could manage far larger herds than a person on foot, could cover distances in a day that walking made unthinkable, and could carry goods, messages and ideas across the grassland faster than ever before. Riding also transformed hunting and raiding, giving mounted groups a sudden and lasting advantage over their unmounted neighbours. Scholars debate exactly when riding, as opposed to mere herding, began; direct evidence is scarce, because a saddle of felt or leather rots away and leaves nothing for the excavator to find. The consequences rippled outward for millennia. Mounted herders spread languages, metals and customs across a continent; later, harnessed to the chariot and then the plough, the horse reshaped warfare and agriculture alike. What began as a wary arrangement between hunters and their prey on a cold northern plain became one of the engines of the ancient world, carrying human ambition wherever the grass would grow.