millennium BChorses were food animals, sharing the life and fate of cattle, pigs,
sheep and goats. Anthony’s narrative is different from Gimbutas’ narrative but
no more tenable, because it retrojects a horse-riding society to an impossibly early
date. In what follows in this chapter I shall summarize, modify and update what
I have presented elsewhere at some length.
Horses as food animals
Since the end of the Pleistocene horses had been by far the most common game
animal on the Eurasian steppes, and they were certainly domesticated as a
meat animal before 3700 BC. Excavations at Botai and Khozai in northern
Kazakhstan have shown that the Chalcolithic population there was almost entirely
dependent upon horsemeat for its protein. At Botai, as Anthony has detailed,
some 300,000 animal bones were found in house-pits, and although bones or teeth
of an occasional deer, bovid, elk or boar have been identified, over 99 percent of
the bones came from horses.^22 The steppe was home to huge numbers of wild
horses, and many of the horses eaten in northern Kazakhstan were probably
killed by hunters. Marsha Levine, who believes that domestication of the horse
did not occur much before the end of the third millennium BC, argues that all of
the Botai and Khozai horses were killed by hunters, in herd drives.^23 It is reported,
however, that the excavators found evidence for the penning of horses at these
sites, and that an analysis of the pottery discovered a residue left by mare’s milk.^24
Although most domestic mares have no objection to being milked, milking a wild
mare would have been an adventure.
There is good reason to think that horses were domesticated long before the
3700 BCdate from Botai and Khozai. At Dereivka, as mentioned above, Dmitriy
Telegin found that approximately 75 percent of the bones—largely left in hearths
and kitchen middens—at this Neolithic site came from horses. Levine argues on
the basis of the slaughter pattern that these were wild horses, killed by hunters,
and on the same basis Anthony argues that they were domestic.^25 By the late fifth
millennium BCthe domestication of food animals was widespread in the steppe
and it would not be very surprising if by then the Neolithic villagers at Dereivka
had domesticated horses, which were ubiquitous in the steppe (because so well
adapted for that environment).^26 Villagers in the forest steppe along the Volga
may have been keeping horses even in the middle of the fifth millennium BC: the
eleven horses slaughtered as funerary victims at Khvalynsk—like the sheep, goats
and cattle sacrificed in the same cemetery—were very likely domestic animals
kept for their meat.^27
Equids as pack animals
Initially all of the domesticates were valued exclusively as a source of food,
but eventually people learned that some of their animals could be useful in other
ways. What Andrew Sherratt called the Secondary Products Revolution seems to
have been a drawn-out process in the second half of the fourth millennium BC.^28
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 33