(ORDO NEWS) — Already five thousand years ago, the inhabitants of Southern Europe rode horses, and archaeologists have found evidence of this habit by studying the specific pathologies of human skeletons.
Humans domesticated horses about five and a half thousand years ago, but they were originally bred as draft or dairy cattle, not mounts.
Until now, scientists have focused on the skeletons of the animals themselves when attempting to establish when riding began, looking for specific damage to the teeth and jaws left by a bridle, or horse bones in places where their wild relatives did not live.
However, the interaction between horse and rider does not go in the same direction, and just as a human influences the anatomy of a domestic horse, the horse itself influences the structure of the human skeleton.
And members of an international team of researchers who have studied the skeletons of the Yamnaya people found in burial mounds in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary have discovered ancient pathologies left behind by the constant interaction of rider and mount.
Scientists studied 217 human skeletons, of which more than 150 were found in barrows of the Yamnaya culture and belonged to ancient shepherds who raised sheep and cattle in the steppes of southeastern Europe.
Various pathologies in people of that time are far from uncommon, but the researchers did not consider them separately: instead, they identified six characteristic changes in the skeleton (including curvature of the femurs and degenerative processes in the spine) that are also observed in modern people who have been involved in horseback riding for many years. ride.
After evaluating the degree of manifestation of these signs, the team identified 24 skeletons in the category of “possible horsemen”, and the remains of nine people, of which five belonged to the Yamnaya culture, called “highly likely horsemen”.
It is not yet possible to say whether these people used horses for herding cattle, raiding neighbors, or simply as a symbol of social status, but it is certain that horses played an extremely important role in their lives.
By learning to ride, the people of the Yamnaya culture greatly increased their own mobility. This allowed them to manage numerous herds of livestock with relative ease and spread over an impressive territory from Hungary in the west to China in the east (in the form of the so-called Afanasiev culture).
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