Posts Tagged ‘horses’
“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”*…
The horse transformed human history—and now, as Christina Larson reports, scientists have a clearer idea of when humans began to transform the horse…
Around 4,200 years ago, one particular lineage of horse quickly became dominant across Eurasia, suggesting that’s when humans started to spread domesticated horses around the world, according to research published [recently] in the journal Nature.
There was something special about this horse: It had a genetic mutation that changed the shape of its back, likely making it easier to ride.
“In the past, you had many different lineages of horses,” said Pablo Librado, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and co-author of the new study. That genetic diversity was evident in ancient DNA samples the researchers analyzed from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating back to 50,000 years ago.
But their analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes showed a notable change around 4,200 years ago.
That’s when a specific lineage that first arose in what’s known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a plains region that stretches from what is now northeastern Bulgaria across Ukraine and through southern Russia, began to pop up all across Eurasia and quickly replaced other lineages. Within three hundred years, the horses in Spain were similar to those in Russia.
“We saw this genetic type spreading almost everywhere in Eurasia—clearly this horse type that was local became global very fast,” said co-author Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France.
The researchers believe that this change was because a Bronze Age people called the Sintashta had domesticated their local horse and begun to use these animals to help them dramatically expand their territory.
Domesticating wild horses on the plains of Eurasia was a process, not a single event, scientists say.
Archaeologists have previously found evidence of people consuming horse milk in dental remains dating to around 5,500 years ago, and the earliest evidence of horse ridership dates to around 5,000 years ago. But it was the Sintashta who spread the particular horses they had domesticated across Eurasia, the new study suggests…
People had domesticated other animals several thousand years before horses—including dogs, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep. But the new research shows that the shrinking genetic diversity associated with domestication happened much faster in horses.
“Humans changed the horse genome stunningly quickly, perhaps because we already had experience dealing with animals,” said Laurent Frantz, who studies the genetics of ancient creatures at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was not involved in the study.
“It shows the special place of horses in human societies.”…
“Scientists have traced the origin of the modern horse to a lineage that emerged 4,200 years ago,” from @larsonchristina in @physorg_com.
* Shakespeare, Richard III
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As we mount up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that Eadweard Muybridge took a series of photographs to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs. He had been retained by former California Governor (and university founder) Leland Stanford to help settle a bet. While Muybridge was best known in his own day for his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, he did seminal early work on motion picture projection, and the approaches he developed for the study of motion are at the heart of both animation and computer analysis today.
“I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!”*…
Susanna Forrest takes a deep dive into a fascinating subculture that lasted for almost a century: the Amazons of Paris…
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the social range of people who could ride for leisure widened, and more and more women rode. This was because horses became more accessible, but for women it was also due to an improvement in the sidesaddle. I will write more about sidesaddles and my – to me – unexpected love for them in another issue of the newsletter. All you need to know here is that in the early 1830s, either in England or in France, a much-disputed innovation made these saddles more secure, which meant in turn that women could attempt greater feats: more daring jumping, more radical “tricks”, and more sophisticated high-school or haute-école dressage.
The term “amazon” was adopted to deal with these new horsewomen. The implication was of fearless, perhaps manly women like the she-warriors who fascinated classical Greece. They were overstepping into a male world, and while they were often admired, there was also something not quite feminine – or perhaps threateningly hearty – about them. The term is used in multiple European languages at this time. In French, it was also part of the term for riding sidesaddle, “monter en amazone” and for a sidesaddle riding habit or “amazone”, often masculine in style from the waist up, with, later in the century, breeches under an apron rather than a flowing skirt. Gradually the term became more feminised and general and seemed to be applied to any horsewoman.
The earliest named women performing on horseback are Philippine Tourniaire and Patty Astley in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the time, male performers did acrobatics and other stunts on horseback, and the women followed suit…
The Amazons were in the ring from, roughly speaking, the 1830s to the early twentieth century, when both circus and circus horsewomen were falling from fashion. They travelled across Europe and sometimes further afield to dance on and ride their horses, which leaves me with a huge variation of place, time, language, social class, and style of performance spread across many archives. I’ll try to both generalise here and introduce you to the subtleties of their professional and personal lives…
It’s an exciting ride. Stuntwomen, dancers, acrobats, jockeys, charioteers, Olympians, actresses, courtesans, dressage riders – and more: “Who were the Amazons of Paris?” from @Susanna_Forrest.
* Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
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As we saddle up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that The Carol Burnett Show aired the last of its 279 episodes; Ms. Burnett had decided, after 11 seasons, to move on. The series had won 25 primetime Emmy Awards; it ranks number 17 on TV Guide‘s list of the 60 Greatest Shows of All Time, and figures in most “100 Best series” lists.
Consider, for example, the iconic “Went with the Wind” sketch…
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