the first riders in the world identified at the gates of Europe
A rider and his horse, near the town of Qamichli, Syria, in September 2021. Delil SOULEIMAN, AFP
After examining more than 200 human remains, a team of researchers discovered several individuals whose bones bear the trace of a life spent on horseback, at the beginning of the IIIe millennium BC.
Textbooks teach that the domestication of the horse goes back to the end from the Neolithic, around 3500 to 3000 years before our era. This phenomenon, which accompanies the control of nature by human beings, arose from the Pontic steppes, at the western end of the great Eurasian plain. As to ancestors of our current horsesthey were tamed at the beginning of bronze agearound 2200 BC, shortly before the appearance first tanks. But when do the first hor***** date? The hypotheses gallop in number, little substantiated. Until the publication at the beginning of March of a decisive study: the horse riding would have existed since at least the first half of the IIIe millennium.
Around twenty Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish and American scientists looked, between 2019 and 2022, at the remains of 217 individuals, mostly men from steppe cultures. Their bones, dated from the fifth to the second millennium BC, were discovered in 39 different sites. At least 150 of these deceased belonged to the Yamna culture, a semi-nomadic Pontic group that had migrated, around 3000 BC. AD, from the borders of the Caucasus to the gates of Europe. Did members of this culture, known for the kurgans it left in Russia and Ukraine, ride horses? The researchers made the bones speak. And these five millennium bones responded.
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Of the hundreds of remains examined, twenty have traces and deformations that are typically found in an experienced rider, announce the researchers in their study published on March 3 in the scientific journal Science Advances . Of these twenty promising individuals, nine belong to the Yamna culture. Finally, the five human remains with deformations characterized with the most certainty are also Yamna. They correspond to people buried in Hungary, Romania And Bulgariadeceased – according to their dating carbon 14 – between 3021 and 2501 BC.
Steppe Patrollers
These five individuals who died in Eastern Europe, at the time of the rise of the first Mesopotamian city-states, would be the first scientifically attested riders. Their identification is based on a set of six osteological indices, that is to say relating to the bones, such as traces of stress on the pelvis and the femurs, a deformation of the acetabulum or even a degeneration of the spine. The multiplication of such indices increases the probability that the individual examined has had sustained physical activity related to horseback riding during his life. These characteristic bone markers of equestrian life are well known to archaeo-anthropologists; the same approach made it possible to recognize a horseman among one of the buried individuals In the sarcophagi discovered under Notre-Dame de Paris.
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“Biomechanical stress markers on human skeletons provide a viable means of furthering the study of equestrian history, and may even provide clues to rider styles and equipment”, say the researchers in their study. Scientists have estimated that the observed stress traces correspond to the most primitive technique of horse riding. Evidenced by depictions of hor***** from the Sumerian Bronze Age, this demanding practice saw the rider clinging to his horse – without saddle or stirrups. Despite the discomfort and the difficulty that this implied, the researchers do not entirely rule out the trail of a warlike function of these first hor*****, even if their usefulness was undoubtedly relative.
“Having a quick means of transport to project and then withdraw from a raid zone had to be useful, even if the fight was on foot», observe the signatories of the study, whose work was notably funded by the European Research Council. “Hor***** were mostly employed to patrol large areas and control larger herds of cattle. bovine and ovine, they add. In short, as summarized for Agence France Presse Martin Trautmann of the university from Helsinkione of the signatories of the study, “these were cowboys, not warriors”. The pastoral development of the Yamna society thus seems to have been accompanied, in the Great West of the Pontic steppes, by generations of hor*****.
