Q&A for History of Mankind (9)

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This is the ninth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email soliciting questions and I got some.

I picked four that I think I can shed the most light upon, and they’re all below. First, let me announce that, throughout the rest of April, all or at least most posts to come will be focused on Chinese history (there’s a lot of it!), so you might perhaps go back and check the Chinese section here, to get up to speed on earlier posts on China, like last week’s:

How to Read A History of Mankind (Updated)

In addition, as tradition requires, I will comment upon a new piece of scholarship that pertains to an older post. Today, that is “First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship” (Science Advances, 3.3.23) by Martin Trautmann et al.

This paper discusses the discovery of human bones with pathologies associated to horse-riding, found in steppe-style Indo-European graves dated to between 3021 BC and 2501 BC in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. As I wrote in the older post The Garden of Eden & Noah's Flood…

The Garden of Eden & Noah's Flood

…the issue of when exactly humans started to ride horses and why is of fundamental importance:

Horses were domesticated and used as mounts across the Pontic steppe after 5000 BC and hunted to extinction almost anywhere else. In the wild, they survived in small, isolated pockets throughout Europe, the Caucasus, and Anatolia until 2500 BC, but were rare or absent in the Near East, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent.[1] Donkeys, which are easier to domesticate and need little water and care, did a lot of the heavy lifting for agricultural societies across Eurasia well before and well after Indo-Europeans made horses fashionable.

Even small pre-historic horses were large, powerful, aggressive animals, more inclined to flee or fight than to carry a human. This means horse-riding in the steppes probably developed only after horses were already familiar as domesticated animals that could be controlled, likely kept as a cheap source of winter meat. Horses are easier to feed through the winter than cattle or sheep, as cattle and sheep inefficiently push snow aside with their noses, while horses use their hard hooves.

By 4800 BC, horse remains abound in the settlements of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, such as Khvalynsk and Syezzhe in the middle Volga region, and Nikolskoe on the Dnieper Rapids, and bone carvings of horses appear with carvings of cattle in a few sites like Syezzhe and Varfolomievka.[4] At some point late in the millennium, a small group of horses, or perhaps a single horse, was trained someplace in the region so that it would accept carrying a rider on its back; and the descendants of this stud, or small group of studs, have carried humans ever since.

What this paper says is that, by the late 4^th millennium, humans were regularly involved in horse-riding, at least at times, which is not hugely surprising but provides clear evidence of a chronology that was rather fuzzy until now.

In addition to the paper on horse-riding, I’d like to call your attention to this great explainer of the state of play regarding the Cold Winters Theory:

Cold winters theory: a summary of the evidence and replies to objections

While not an academic paper of the sort I tend to review here (it’s actually more of a summary of various papers), this is a very important subject, and also a pretty controversial one. In summary, the idea is that cold winters tend to create specific societies, more prone to long-term thinking (you need to prepare for the winter), nuclear families (if you are a man who leaves a bunch of kids with their mothers and don’t provide them, chances are they may freeze/starve to death) and, generally speaking, the smarts necessary to survive in an environment that is unforgiving for dudes in shorts who pass out drunk in the middle of the road.

(This is, by the way, a rather popular theory in China. Chinese scholars have always been puzzled by the fact that northern peoples, as a rule, appear more “civilized” than southern peoples.)

Emil Kirkegaard, the author of that post, concludes that the cold winter theory enjoys three relatively independent lines of support; it faces only non-fatal objections; and it can, and has been, tested. Which is great, since I refer to this theory (in an approving tone) in two old posts, directly in “The First Temple, the First City & the First Egyptians” and indirectly in “The First Pyramids of the Americas & the Indo-Europeans of the Steppes.”

Now for the questions: