Neolithic riders?

Although more than accompanied or athletic riding of horses cannot be assumed until the end of the third millennium bc, it has long been argued that villagers on the steppe had been riding horses regularly and efficiently already in the third, fourth and even the fifth. According to the thesis advocated by Gimbutas until the early 1990s and in recent decades by Anthony, for hunting and herding purposes villagers on the steppe were riding horses as early as 4200 bc, controlling their mounts with reins and organic bits. Along with many others who have written on the subject, Gimbutas and Anthony assumed that the domestication of horses as food animals required the herding of horses, which of course could not have been done unless the herder was riding a horse.³⁵ “It is unthinkable,” Gimbutas was right in stating, “that herds of horses could be controlled on foot.”³⁶ I doubt, however, that domesticated horses at Neolithic Khvalynsk, Dereivka or other steppe villages were any more in need of herding than were domesticated cattle. By definition animals that are domesticated have a bond to their domus, their home. Unlike sheep, goats, or other small animals taken away from home and into places where danger lurks, horses do not need a herdsman and his dog to protect them, and horses raised as domesticates are likely to stay fairly close to home. If the foals were tethered, the mares would not have strayed far from the village and would have returned to be suckled by their foals and milked by the villagers. The villagers’ stallion would be the first line of defense against any wild stallion that tried to elope with the mares, and all the horses would have learned to appreciate a shed for shelter and for shade. Feeding calls—for fodder in the winter, and for a bit of grain at any time—would have brought all of the herd home promptly.

The evidence presented to support the contention that horses were routinely ridden in the fifth and fourth millennium bc is the substantial beveling on seven of thirty-one equine pre-molars (the P₂s) recovered from the house-pits at Botai and Khozai.³⁷ These seven P₂s, which necessarily came from at least four horses, show a beveling of at least 3 mm, and Anthony argues that such beveling can only have resulted from the horses’ chewing—over an extended period of time— on organic mouthpieces with which they were bitted. The twenty-four other P₂s located at the sites also exhibited beveling, although less than 3 mm. One could argue that the twelve or more horses from which the less beveled P₂s came had also been bitted and ridden, although less frequently than the four horses whose P₂s were more beveled. Contrarily, one could argue that whatever the twelve horses chewed in order to bevel their P₂s slightly must have been chewed more frequently or more vigorously by the four horses whose P₂s were beveled more substantially.

That horses were not routinely ridden at Dereivka ca. 4200 bc, and at Botai and Khozai ca. 3700 bc, is of course impossible to prove. Some considerations, however, weigh heavily against that possibility. To begin, one may wonder why horses that were giving service as mounts should have been slaughtered and eaten by the Botai villagers. In a famine the butchering of a riding horse might from time to time have been necessary, but wild horses were obviously ubiquitous in northern Khazakstan in Chalcolithic times. At the least one would have to concede that at Botai the bonding between horse and rider was no closer than the bond between a food animal and its owner. Also detrimental for Anthony’s thesis is a recent analysis of the faunal evidence at Begash, in southeastern Kazakhstan. The analysts concluded that at Begash the real shift to horses occurred not in the fifth or fourth millennium bc but at the end of the second.³⁸

Much more puzzling than the butchering of riding horses is that an invention of the bit ca. 4200 bc could have been of so little consequence that no demonstrable element of a bit appears anywhere in the archaeological record until shortly before 2000 bc. Obviously useful inventions normally proliferated within centuries rather than millennia. The first wheeled vehicles were produced in the second half of the fourth millennium bc, and by the end of that millennium wheeled vehicles are archeologically attested from Denmark to central Asia and the Persian Gulf. The spoked wheel first appeared at the end of the third millennium bc, and again we have evidence that light, spoke-wheeled carts were soon in vogue over much of the steppe and the Near East. Stirrups appeared in china in the fourth century CE and by the eighth were in use in western Europe.³⁹ If horses were routinely and competently ridden in the steppe already in the fifth millennium bc at least a few of them should eventually have been obtained by Near Eastern kings. But until the end of the third millennium bc the donkey or onager-donkey hybrid remained the only equid of value and significance in all of the Near East.

The earliest demonstrable cheekpieces, and so the earliest demonstrable bit, can now be dated—thanks to Anthony’s own initiative—to shortly before 2000 bc. It is hardly coincidental that at just that time a documented surge of interest in the horse began. We know, that is, that the riding and especially the driving of horses has been continuous from the end of the third millennium bc to the present day. Evolution of the bit was also continuous and relatively rapid. At its first demonstrable appearance, ca. 2000 bc, the bit was primitive and was made entirely of organic materials. By 1700 bc metal bits were in use and by the fourteenth century bc many drivers used jointed snaffle bits made of bronze, not much different in design from the standard bit in use all over the world today. In contrast, no evolution of the bit had occurred in the millennia preceding 2000 bc. A comment by Philip Kohl is pertinent:

Perhaps, horses were initially “domesticated” on the Ukrainian steppes in the fifth millennium or in western Kazakhstan by the mid-fourth millennium bc, but, if so, the effects of such horse domestication were not felt throughout the greater Ancient Near East and Europe until much later. . . . christopher Columbus discovered America, not Leif Eriksson.⁴⁰

According to Anthony the invention of the bit ca. 4200 bc did have consequences, and they were enormous. No connection between these consequences and the invention of the bit, however, is demonstrable. In Anthony’s scenario the riders in the steppe begin raiding flocks and herds, and the raids lead to social and economic upheaval: the collapse ca. 4000 bc of what Gimbutas called “Old Europe” (the numerous agricultural settlements in the lands along the lower Danube and its tributaries), the creation ca. 3700 bc and the demise ca. 3400 bc of the supertowns in the forest steppe between the Bug and the Dnieper, and ultimately the Indo-Europeanizing of Anatolia, the Balkans, and the rest of Europe.

So far as the end of “Old Europe” is concerned, Anthony suggests that it was the result of raids from the steppe by riders whose language was ancestral to Indo- European:

Raiding parties of a dozen riders could move fifty to seventy-five head of cattle or horses fairly quickly over hundreds of kilometers. Thieving raids would have led to deaths, and then to more serious killing and revenge raids. A cycle of warfare from thieving to revenge raids probably contributed to the collapse of the tell towns of the Danube valley.⁴¹

In a folk migration the mounted herders and raiders from the Dnieper valley move westward. “Their move into the lower Danube valley probably was the historical event that separated the Pre-Anatolian dialects from the Proto-Indo- European language communities back in the steppes.”⁴² Anthony suggests that ca. 3000 bc, after living in the valley of the lower Danube for 1000 years and establishing the Suvorovo archaeological culture of eastern Bulgaria, the ProtoAnatolian speakers finally moved—with their riding horses—to Anatolia.⁴³

In the lands along the lower and middle Danube horses were certainly more common in the fourth and third millennia bc than they had been in the sixth and fifth. Although bone evidence shows that at most sites horses were far outnumbered by cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, at Csepel-Haros in eastern Hungary slightly more than half the animal bones found in Bell Beaker levels of the late third millennium bc were horse bones.⁴⁴ There is no evidence, however, that in Chalcolithic Europe horses were anything other than food animals, the taste for horsemeat having spread from the Eurasian steppe into what had been “Old Europe.” As for the Suvorovo people riding horses into Anatolia ca. 3000 bc, our first chapter has shown the evidence that the Anatolian languages were indigenous to western Anatolia. Another huge problem is that throughout the third millennium bc Anatolians seem to have been no more able than anyone else to drive horses, much less to ride them. Until ca. 2000 bc we have no evidence for tamed horses in western and central Anatolia, where the Anatolian languages were spoken. When evidence finally appears it indicates that for the Anatolians of ca. 2000 bc the riding and the driving of horses were exciting and challenging novelties. A cylinder sealing from Khltepe shows that at the beginning of the second millennium bc the inhabitants of Kanesh, the very city in which the so-called Hittite language evolved, managed horses not with reins and a bit but with a single line attached to a nose-ring. It is inconceivable that the speakers of the Anatolian languages could have regressed so completely, from competent horsemen ca. 3000 bc to utter greenhorns, unfamiliar with horses, 1000 years later.

Anthony suggests that the Keltic, Italic and Germanic languages were brought into Europe by another folk migration of riders from the steppe. Ca. 3000 bc, that is, the migrators left their Yamna culture between the Dniester and the Dnieper and came into the Danube valley, whence they spread out into central and northern Europe.⁴⁵ In all of these areas the natives adopt the newcomers’ language because they admire and emulate the newcomers, who have grown rich as horse-breeders and horse-traders. Anthony suggests that “the annual demand for steppe horses in Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age Europe could easily have totaled thousands of animals during the initial expansion of horseback riding beyond the steppes. That would have made some steppe horse dealers wealthy.”⁴⁶

Like Gimbutas’ original theory, Anthony’s founders on the fact that neither on the steppe nor in those areas of Europe supposedly overrun by riders from the steppe do we find evidence that men were riding or even driving horses until ca. 2000 bc, which is also the time at which the earliest demonstrable cheekpieces appear. It is also relevant that until the end of the third millennium bc Near Easterners were not sufficiently impressed by their northern neighbors’ riding to import horses for themselves and to learn how to ride them. Nowhere, so far as we know, did any artist depict a person riding a horse, nor did any scribe mention such an act, until shortly before 2000 bc. Through most of the third millennium bc the horse was still a food animal. The relationship between people and horses differed little from the relationship between people and cattle.