Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink by Richard L Currier

Author:Richard L Currier [Currier, Richard L]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-08-18T07:00:00+00:00

The Horse, the Wheel, and Warfare7

The horse was hunted as a game animal for at least four hundred thousand years, first by emerging humans, later by the Neandertals, and still later by the anatomically modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic. In fact, when the nomads of the Eurasian steppes originally domesticated the horse roughly six thousand years ago, it was not for the purpose of transportation but rather as a source of food. The reason is simple: the horse was the only animal capable of feeding itself in a snow-covered pasture.

The open grasslands of the Eurasian steppes are subject to intense cold during the winter, and for much of the time they are covered in a blanket of snow. The people of the late Neolithic had already domesticated sheep and cattle—whose meat they preferred—but both of those animals must be fed by hand when snow and ice cover the ground. Sheep can break through ice-crusted snow with their noses to reach the grass underneath, but the sharp edges of broken ice will lacerate the soft skin of a sheep’s nose. Cows are even more helpless; unable to uncover the grass under a blanket of snow, cows will starve even while food is only a few inches beneath the surface. But horses, which are native to the open grasslands of the northern latitudes, will paw away the snow with their sharp hooves and graze easily in snow-covered pastures.

Once they had domesticated the horse as an alternative source of meat, the Eurasian nomads discovered that these animals could be controlled by a bit placed in their mouths and attached to a bridle made of rope or leather. In fact, by examining the wear patterns on the teeth of horses that were buried in the graves of their masters, the archeologist David W. Anthony demonstrated that horses were being controlled by simple bits and bridles as early as 4000 BC.8

The Eurasian nomads learned not only to ride horses but also to build wagons of wood covered with awnings of cloth, and they fashioned harnesses that enabled their horses to pull these wagons long distances over the steppes. Before long, the Eurasian herdsmen became the most mobile nomads on Earth, moving their families and all of their worldly possessions hundreds of miles every year in search of new pastures for their flocks. Five thousand years later, the pioneers of the American West crossed the untamed wilderness of the prairies using covered wagons of an almost identical design.

Although it remains to be determined whether the wheel was first invented in the steppes of Eurasia or the river valleys of Mesopotamia, there is no doubt that as soon as people began using wagons and carts, the use of the wheel spread like wildfire across the whole of Eurasia, from western Europe to China (see Figure 7.9). Evidence of wagons and carts appears suddenly throughout both Europe and Asia beginning in 3500 BC, in the form of drawings and clay models of wagons, the appearance of a written sign for “wagon,” and the archeological remains of both wheels and wagon parts.

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