fourth and even the fifth. According to the thesis advocated by Gimbutas until the
early 1990s and in recent decades by Anthony, for hunting and herding purposes
villagers on the steppe were riding horses as early as 4200 BC, controlling their
mounts with reins and organic bits. Along with many others who have written on
the subject, Gimbutas and Anthony assumed that the domestication of horses as
food animals required the herding of horses, which of course could not have been
done unless the herder was riding a horse.^35 “It is unthinkable,” Gimbutas was
right in stating, “that herds of horses could be controlled on foot.”^36 I doubt,
however, that domesticated horses at Neolithic Khvalynsk, Dereivka or other steppe
villages were any more in need of herding than were domesticated cattle. By
definition animals that are domesticated have a bond to their domus, their home.
Unlike sheep, goats, or other small animals taken away from home and into places
where danger lurks, horses do not need a herdsman and his dog to protect them,
and horses raised as domesticates are likely to stay fairly close to home. If the
foals were tethered, the mares would not have strayed far from the village and
would have returned to be suckled by their foals and milked by the villagers. The
villagers’ stallion would be the first line of defense against any wild stallion that
tried to elope with the mares, and all the horses would have learned to appreciate
a shed for shelter and for shade. Feeding calls—for fodder in the winter, and for
a bit of grain at any time—would have brought all of the herd home promptly.
The evidence presented to support the contention that horses were routinely
ridden in the fifth and fourth millennium BCis the substantial beveling on seven
of thirty-one equine pre-molars (the P 2 s) recovered from the house-pits at Botai
and Khozai.^37 These seven P 2 s, which necessarily came from at least four horses,
show a beveling of at least 3 mm, and Anthony argues that such beveling can
only have resulted from the horses’ chewing—over an extended period of time—
on organic mouthpieces with which they were bitted. The twenty-four other P 2 s
located at the sites also exhibited beveling, although less than 3 mm. One could
argue that the twelve or more horses from which the less beveled P 2 s came had
also been bitted and ridden, although less frequently than the four horses whose
P 2 s were more beveled. Contrarily, one could argue that whatever the twelve horses
chewed in order to bevel their P 2 s slightly must have been chewed more frequently
or more vigorously by the four horses whose P 2 s were beveled more substantially.
That horses were not routinely ridden at Dereivka ca. 4200 BC, and at Botai
and Khozai ca. 3700 BC, is of course impossible to prove. Some considerations,
however, weigh heavily against that possibility. To begin, one may wonder why
horses that were giving service as mounts should have been slaughtered and eaten
by the Botai villagers. In a famine the butchering of a riding horse might from
time to time have been necessary, but wild horses were obviously ubiquitous in
northern Khazakstan in Chalcolithic times. At the least one would have to concede
that at Botai the bonding between horse and rider was no closer than the bond
between a food animal and its owner. Also detrimental for Anthony’s thesis is a
recent analysis of the faunal evidence at Begash, in southeastern Kazakhstan. The
analysts concluded that at Begash the real shift to horses occurred not in the fifth
or fourth millennium BCbut at the end of the second.^38
36 The Kurgan theory and taming of horses