Second sentence of the entry on "Botai Culture" on the page "Domestication of the Horse":Lambuzhao wrote:Where, exactly?
Both sources cited in-line for that statement pre-date the publication that pointed out the milk residue found at Botai sites, leading to my statement that their being horse-riding hunter-gatherers was the "initial interpretation."The Botai culture was a culture of foragers who seem to have adopted horseback riding in order to hunt the abundant wild horses of northern Kazakhstan between 3500–3000 BCE.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information about stirrups. It's my understanding that the late development of the stirrup is well documented, and attributable to the fact that, without a solid support, using stirrups can cause serious injury to a horse's back fairly quickly.Lambuzhao wrote:And granted about the saddling issue. plenty of folks rode horses bareback or with just some kind of blanket or two, but plenty of others used some kind of reinforced blanket-cum-surcingle, and even stirrups, centuries before the saddle-tree was developed.
First of all, the statements in question appear to be reasonably well sourced, so the fact that anyone can edit the articles is largely immaterial. Secondly, a degree of disagreement ("inconsistency") is to be expected in academic discourse, especially with regard to a discipline like Archaeology, which is based on interpreting a fragmentary and often ambiguous body of evidence. Thirdly, regardless of what the initial motivation for domesticating horses may have been, I feel that my point still stands. The domestic horse was a suitable animal for riding very early in its history, possibly even in its "wild" state; the same cannot be said for the llama.Lambuzhao wrote:Incidentally, the Wikipedia article about the Saddle states that horse-riding came not long after initial domestication. Sounds like riding was not the initial motivation for horse domestication, according to that source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle
Aaaah, Wikipedia. The joys of an openly-editable encyclopedia: the inconsistencies never cease.
From a purely common-sense standpoint, it seems much more plausible that people might discover the rideability of an already rideable animal than that they would develop the idea of breeding non-rideable animals to produce a rideable one in the absence of an existing model of rideability. Based on the existing evidence, in fact, it look like the latter scenario probably never happened in the course of human history.
