Professor William Taylor's upcoming book, ‘Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History,’ featured in A&S Magazine. In the book, Professor Taylor writes that today’s world has been molded by humans’ relationship to horses.
Nearly a million years ago in what is now southern England, human ancestors called Homo heidelbergensis were creating tools from horse bones. Fast forward to about 30,000 years ago, and humans across Europe and northern Eurasia were regularly painting horses on cave walls and carving their likenesses from bone and ivory.
“The connection between people and horses is among the most ancient connections that we have with the animal world,” says William Taylor, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and curator of archaeology for the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History.
But Taylor says it’s what happened about 4,000 years ago that really changed things. That’s when people living in the grasslands near the Black Sea first domesticated horses.
And when that happened, Taylor says the effect on the world and the centuries that followed was not a gradual development “but a sudden jolt, a shock to the system” that influenced nearly every aspect of human life―revolutionizing things like transportation, agriculture and warfare.
“After domestication, horses spread like wildfire, stampeding into new societies, creating new partnerships with people that shook up the structure of the ancient world almost everywhere they went,” he explains.
Learn more about Professor Taylor's research and book in A&S Magazine