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WyngZero t1_jb58s83 wrote

Reply to comment by nuck_forte_dame in Humans Started Riding Horses 5,000 Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests by geoxol

That's what I was thinking too. The Pyramids date back 5000 years ago or so. I'd imagine humans well figured out how to ride a horse before building the pyramids.

I mean, the Pyramids are so ancient by the time Caesar went to Egypt the Pyramids were already considered ancient.

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virishking t1_jb5gmi0 wrote

You can’t necessarily make that comparison since you’re dealing with different groups of people. This study indicates the Yamnaya- a pastoralist people of the Pontic-Caspian steppe- were riding horses several hundred years before the great pyramid was built in Egypt. It’s also important to note that horse domestication =/= horse riding. Even this article notes evidence of horse domestication that predates this. Meat, milk, pack animals, chariots, these things all likely predate horse riding given that wild horses didn’t have backs strong enough for it. Horse riding likely would’ve come along after generations of domestic horse breeding for those purposes.

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tossawaybb t1_jb6mel0 wrote

Yep. The big thing is food availability. Large horse breeds can't subsist purely off grass, there just aren't enough calories in there. Supplementing with grain, however, works quite well. Even without intentional selective breeding, domestication improved their food prospects enough to enable larger and larger horses

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[deleted] t1_jb6340l wrote

It took some time for the horse to become strong enough to carry a human. That is artificial selection that played the role of evolution

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HoarseCoque t1_jb6v68t wrote

Egypt didnt have horses until well after then. The Hyksos brought them to Egypt when they invaded around 1600 bc

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IamPurgamentum t1_jb6776h wrote

The whole timeline seems off to me. Think of how many things that have been invented in the last 100 years and then then 100 before that.

It seems crazy to me that these guys were around supposedly just 5000 years ago and that they didn't have the same graduations in learning and technology.

Riding a horse seems pretty basic, especially given that people back then are perceived as being closer to nature.

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WyngZero t1_jb6dacz wrote

In all fairness technological development for the last 100 years is hyperbolically steeper than anytime in human history and even the 100 years prior (the first car patent is supposedly from 138 years ago).

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IamPurgamentum t1_jb6dwx8 wrote

Does that not follow though? I mean, you would expect it to be exponential. My point is more that there is still a huge amount of time in between now and then. That's without getting to the 'how did they do all these things and what's their purpose' bit.

It seems logical that there would be more advances even back then.

The sumarians who came before the Egyptians were also quite advanced, and again you're talking about 1000s of years between the two civilisations.

It just seems strange to me.

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walruskingmike t1_jb6lsos wrote

You used the word exponential and then failed to understand that it is basically exponential and that's the exact reason technological advances didn't happen nearly as often back then. Something like a J-curve can be basically flat for a very long time before going near-vertical in a relatively short amount of time.

It took a long time to breed horses large enough to be ridden. The last remaining wild horse species is Przewalski's horse, and it's only 122-142cm at the shoulder. Light riding horses today are 142-163cm, while larger riding horses are 157-173cm; and then you have heavy draft horses, who are 163-183cm. It wasn't just a matter of some dude hopping onto a horse and going "aha!". People probably tried riding horses the moment they were domesticated, but they weren't large enough to do it reliably yet; it'd be like riding into battle on a pony or a donkey.

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IamPurgamentum t1_jb6nxcy wrote

OK. Then what about someone who isn't an adult?

You're missing my point entirely. My argument isn't so much about technology. It's about the length of time.

I'm not arguing that they should have advanced as much but merely that they should have advanced. People would have made discoveries, practices and methods would have changed. To my knowledge the human brain hasn't changed that much. People would still be inquisitive.

The presentation we are given with articles such as this only feeds the impression that people were basic and that they did not think in the way we do. In basic terms they weren't that advanced. That doesn't really follow through.

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walruskingmike t1_jb6y53q wrote

So you're suggesting that children rode horses before adults? What for? Baby soldiers? Why would that practice spread in the way you think it would?

No one is suggesting that they didn't make technological advancements. They did. Where did you hear that people "didn't advance"? Also, you're starting to sound an awful lot like social darwinism.

If you have even a cursory knowledge of archaeology, then you know that there have been a lot of technological developments over thousands of years, but technology is iterative; it gets faster and easier the more that has already been done. Rate of technological advances also increase alongside literacy, so before writing was developed, it all had to be passed down verbally, i.e., there's no library to hold all of the designs. I don't know why you're drawing this bizarre conclusion because of when ridable horses were first developed. Horse riding isn't indicative of much except riding horses.

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IamPurgamentum t1_jb6ynas wrote

If technology and advances are exponential then does it not stand to reason that horse riding would have developed far earlier?

That's all I was getting at. Stereotype me all you want if it helps you.

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walruskingmike t1_jb714hz wrote

No, it doesn't stand to reason. You have to domesticate them first; and remember that a horse can easily kill a man, even a small one. This means you need to have a good reason to devote resources to doing that, you need to already have the other technologies that go alongside animal husbandry, and you need to be in the right place at the right time to even be around horses.

Technological advancements don't happen just because, and cultural change isn't some linear path that everyone on earth is going down the same way; if it were, people in sub Saharan Africa would've domesticated Zebras a long time ago and done the same thing as people in Eurasia did with horses, but they didn't; it clearly wasn't worth doing for them.

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IamPurgamentum t1_jb73e6v wrote

We're talking about a civilisation that made gigantic structures in an unknown way, that as best as we can sumise used pulleys to move extremely heavy items. You don't think animals would be involved in that in some way, you don't don't think that someone at something in those thousands of years would wonder about about riding them? People ride elephants that can crush them in seconds, they keep monkeys that could rip their faces off as pets. Enki is oftern depicted with a tame lion. In a traditional hunter gatherer sense you would want to understand animal behaviour. As we've discussed, this carries on to other things. It's difficult to imagine going that far with an animal such as a horse but ignoring something like riding it when it has been drawn on so many times throughout history. Everything is always improved on, but it always starts with the basics. It's very rare to overlook the fundamentals of these advancements because they have even around so long. Horses were and are used for many things.

The zebra part is interesting but again it plays into the view that these people knew what they were doing. Zebras are perceived as more equal to donkeys. As such, it's likely that in times past people realised this and so prioritised horses.

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walruskingmike t1_jb76hav wrote

You're simply ignoring that horses leave skeletons when they die and we can measure those skeletons. We know when they could be ridden and when they couldn't. They needed to be bred for riding; engineering an animal to grow by 40% isn't simple and takes a long time. You're just making false equivalencies to other technologies based on nothing but conjecture.

And by your own logic that people should've decided to develop horse riding much earlier, then people in sub Saharan Africa should've been riding around on Zebras. They weren't "prioritizing horses" because horses are not a native species. They were brought into sub Saharan Africa relatively recently, so why didn't people ride Zebras when there were no horses present, a period that lasted tens of thousands of years? By your logic, it should've happened. And if zebras are perceived more like donkies, then that also applies to early horses, which mentioned earlier. A zebra and early horses are about the same size, so the conditions are about equal.

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IamPurgamentum t1_jb788tf wrote

No, that's not my argument and you keep mentioning zebras when we have just established the difference between a zebra, a horse and a donkey. There is a difference of intelligence. To advocate that this is what was used and regarded enough to breed when other similar creatures were around is to acknowledge that they knew the difference. To know the difference means they are more than capable of considering and attempting to put someone on top of a horse, baring anything else. If you imported those creatures then the people before realised this and so on.

The size of the horse (unless it's massively smaller) is irrelevant, children were sent to work not so long ago.

You're are caught on your argument rather than considering the argument against it. People are people.

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walruskingmike t1_jb87cr3 wrote

You keep shifting your goalpost and ignoring like half of what I say in each comment. Now suddenly early horses were chosen because they're so much smarter than zebras and donkeys. Did you ever think that maybe horses have been bred for their intelligence? They're also nearly half a meter taller now too, because we bred them for it. Did you personally compare the intelligence of early horses to zebras? Hell, even to Przewalski's horse, if you want to get comparative about it. Because if not, you have no point here, just more guesses.

We're back to child cavalry now, are we? What exactly can you get done more with a child on the back of a horse that you couldn't get done by just having the horse pull something? Bear in mind, that in order to tame a horse for riding so that it won't buck you off, you need someone to break it in while on its back, a back that won't hold an adult; even modern horses don't like this process when feral and they've been bred for this for thousands of years. So now you need tweens breaking them in. So you're arguing that a culture decided to have their children try to be the first horsemen, something that's incredibly dangerous and at that point hadn't been tried; and for what reason, you still haven't said. Not to mention, there is exactly zero evidence for child-only horsemanship in either history or archaeology; but hey, it makes you think you're clever.

I guess all of history, anthropology, and archeology are wrong, though, and some dude on the internet is right. You got me. Go ahead and respond in whatever way makes you feel smartest if you really feel like you need the last word. I won't be reading it.

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vashoom t1_jb7o1yk wrote

> exponential

You keep using that word but are not understanding what it means. The further back you go on an exponential curve, the shallower it gets. Technological advancements are exponential. That's why they're faster now and slower way back when.

But that's also a simplification, because "humanity" is not a single entity with a single development curve. Civilizations grow and advance and then develop new technology and societal complexity faster and faster, and then they stagnate/fall, new ones evolve and branch off of them, etc.

Also there are major differences in society and technology between 5000 years ago and 1000 years ago, so I don't even understand your premise.

Lastly, why would riding animals need to be something a culture developed early? Animals are far more useful as food, wool, beasts of burden, etc. It also requires pretty sophisticated techniques and technology to effectively ride animals, especially on battle (stirrups for one thing). Hitching a cart, which were human powered before, to an animal is actually less complicated than developing horseback riding.

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tossawaybb t1_jb6neer wrote

It pretty much is, you can't forget that an exponential curve looks the same no matter how much you "zoom" in. It takes ten thousand years to go from stone to bronze, a thousand years from bronze to iron, and then merely a few hundred years to go from simple steam coal mine pumps to nuclear-heated steam-electric turbines. You don't see an enormous change in quality of life for the average person, but the reality is that each of these advancements absolutely rocked their contemporary world. Combined with how technological advancement only takes hold with economic incentive (steam engines have been around for a thousand years, their uses have not) you get what looks like very little progress until just now. But in reality there was constant independent innovation and improvement around the world.

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