Necessary-Lack-4600 t1_jcvasqd wrote on March 19, 2023 at 8:53 PM

Reply to comment by aldinski in How different were the first horses domesticated by humans compared to modern horses? by clacker96

>To me the idea of herding an animal good in running like horses as a walking human seems ridiculous.

Why? Herding is not running behind fleeing animals. Herding is making them accustomed to you with lots of patience, not scaring them by trying run after them. Quite a lot domesticated animals run faster than humans. No-one can outrun a cow. Even sheep are way faster than most humans. But we did domesticate and herd them.

aldinski t1_jcvh06a wrote on March 19, 2023 at 9:35 PM

Yeah, maybe. But catching animals is always part of the herding, usually not daily business, but in many situations, least not of all catching for the kill. Horses are constant grazers and not as feed efficient as cows (or goats and sheep) this also means that they cover a lot of ground a day and they are skittish flight animals. So you can not compare them to cow/sheet/goat. Also horses haven been domesticated quite late in history, compared to the other animals. Botai horses clearly were ridden, so riding horses was part of the horse herding business and was developed in parallel.