The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The New Warfare

horses seldom stood more than thirteen hands high, about the
size of a large pony.'
Just as the onager and the ass were domesticated in the Fer-
tile Crescent and Egypt during the neolithic period, so was the
horse domesticated when its natural habitat began to be culti-
vated. 2 The neolithic population of central Europe and the Eur-
asian steppe not only continued to savor horse meat, but also
had a taste for mare's milk. With domestication, horses were
introduced into the wooded regions of northern and western
Europe, and by the end of the third millennium, the horse was
a common domestic animal from France to Turkestan. At neo-
lithic sites in the open steppe from the Ural River to Rumania,
horse bones not infrequently account for approximately half of
all the animal bones recovered. 11
Like so many other of the large domestic food animals, the
horse surely was often pressed into service as a pack animal.
The onager and especially the ass were thus employed in the

1. On the taxonomy and the prehistory of the horse, see G. G.
   Simpson, Horses: The Story of the Horse in the Modern World and through Sixty
   Million Years of History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951).


2. F. Hangar, Das Pferd in prahistorischer undfriiher historischer Zeit
   (Wiener Beitrage zur Kulturgeschichte undLinguistik, vol. 11) (Vienna: Herold,
   1956), presented in great detail the evidence for domestication of the horse
   during the neolithic and chalcolithic period in central and eastern Europe
   <38ff.) and in the Tripolye Culture of the Ukraine (47-81). For a more re-
   cent, although narrower, study, see S. Bokonyi, "The Earliest Waves of
   Domesticated Horses in East Europe," JIES 6 (1978): 17-76.


3. At neolithic Dereivka, on the Lower Dnieper, 24 percent of the
   animals attested were horses, accounting for about 60 percent of the meat
   consumed at the site. There is no question that these were domesticated
   food animals. Cf. Anthony, "The 'Kurgan Culture,' " 295: "Fifteen of the
   seventeen sexable horse mandible fragments from the site were those of
   males, and almost all of these were juveniles or young adults; there were no
   'old' individuals. Such a profile would not result from predation on wild
   horse bands." Five hundred miles to the east of Dereivka, at neolithic sites
   on the Lower Volga and north of the Caspian, horses account for 55 percent
   of the bones of domesticated animals. See J. P. Mallory, in his reply to An-
   thony's article, Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 308.