Stephen Budiansky

The Nature of Horses

Romantic tales about the origins of horses appeal to something deep in the hearts of horse lovers. The feral horses of the western United States are sometimes claimed to be survivors of a prehistoric line that somehow evaded extinction, rather than the descendants of escaped Spanish horses (as they almost certainly are). The feral horses of the barrier islands of Virginia and the Carolinas, abandoned by nearby farmers not too many generations ago, have acquired a fanciful history as the descendants of castaways from shipwrecked Spanish galleons. The Andalusian horses brought by Columbus and the conquistadors have somehow been transformed into Arabs. And the Arabs of the North African desert are often held to have evolved there in a distinct, ancient lineage, from a primitive and now extinct wild horse that was sleeker and more delicate than its heavy northern counterparts.

The search for separate races or species of wild horse that separately gave rise to particular modern-day breeds seems to be an especially absorbing pastime, but one for which science offers little or no encouragement. (One skeptical scholar recently—and aptly—complained about this passion for 'making horses out of thin air.')

Although the actual evidence may dash some of the romantic myths about the origins of the horse, it points to a story that is if anything more fascinating. For it appears that the modern horse was likely snatched from the jaws of extinction by a single act of human daring and inspiration in a remote corner of a barely civilized world. The domestic horses that populate the world today may well all be descendants of the horses domesticated in Ukraine 6,000 years ago.

This evidence matches well with general theories of how and why the domestication of various plants and animals happened when and where it did. A precondition for domestication was an animal whose evolutionary history preadapted it to approaching man, and geographic and environmental circumstances that allowed for a period of close association and coevolution between man and animal. It was only after evolution had fashioned an animal that was tamable that man could fame it and begin deliberate, captive breeding.

The rude hunters and farmers who would first begin to domesticate the horse were not neophytes. For the horse arrived relatively late in the history of domestication, and as early as 7,600 years ago the inhabitants of the forest-steppe zones north of the Black Sea were keeping cattle, pigs, and sheep. The immigrants from the lower Danube valley who introduced these animals to the region, along with wheat, barley, and the technology of copper working, had an even older tradition of herding. The first domesticated livestock animals, the sheep and the goat, had entered into full domestication as many as 9,000 years ago. Thus, the people who were destined to become the first horse herders were already well versed in the skills needed to handle animals. The fact that to perform useful work horses must be 'broken' anew in each generation also implies that human innovation may have played a larger role in the domestication of the horse than in that of its domesticated predecessors.

But it is always worth remembering that there are considerable limits to human ingenuity where animals are concerned, even today, after thousands of additional years' worth of experience under our belts. In her reminiscence of growing up in Africa, Elspeth Huxley relates how a hard-bitten hunter named Jock Cameron succeeded, after a great many failures, in training four zebras that he had raised up from foals to pull a buggy. None but Cameron could control them, and not even he at times; at best, the zebras would stand with ears pinned back, teeth bared, biting and kicking at one another, alternately setting off at a full gallop and digging in their heels and refusing to move.

For the small number of species that came equipped with the potential to be domesticated, the question still remains why humans took the final step toward captive breeding and stock raising, when and where they did. There is a growing body of archaeological evidence and theory that supports the notion that this transition from a long, loose association between species to full domestication is most likely to occur in marginal areas, outside the principal range of the animal species and far from the center of the local human culture. Stock tending in the long run allowed for a civilization that could support a much higher-density human population than did hunting and gathering. But that was only in the very long run. Agriculture did not increase wealth, longevity, leisure time, or health for average workers until the Industrial Revolution freed them from the menial, accident-prone, and exhausting toil of agricultural labor. Raising animals in captivity was something that people did in desperation, not triumph; it was the response of people living on the fringes of ancient society, in the most resource-poor areas, struggling to maintain a standard of life that eluded them as game grew scarce, as forests were cut down, as soils were exhausted.

Likewise, it was in the remote, resource-poor reaches of an animal's natural range that it was most likely to be forced into intimate contact with humans. Herds that could no longer make a living in the familiar niche that millions of years of evolution had adapted them to exploit began to seek out a new niche, one that exploited the grain fields and garbage dumps of human habitations. This niche may also have exploited the natural care-giving instincts of humans toward animals that exhibit what animal behaviorists call care-soliciting behavior. In many parts of the world even today, free-roaming populations of feral dogs thrive around villages, not because they serve any useful purpose, but because they are so successful at deflecting human aggression with cringing, submissive behavior that brings out our soft side.