A rider and his horse, near the town of Qamichli, Syria, in September 2021. Evidence 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 dates back to the end of the Neolithic period, 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 for the ancestors of our current horses, they were tamed at the beginning of the Bronze Age, around 2200 years before our era, shortly before the appearance of the first chariots. But when do the first horsemen date? The hypotheses gallop in number, little substantiated. Until the publication at the beginning of March of a decisive study: horse riding has existed since at least the first half of the IIIe millennium.
About twenty Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish and American scientists have studied, between 2019 and 2022, 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.
Read alsoThe mysteries of the Venus de Condate, discovered at the bottom of an ancient quarry in Rennes
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 Bulgaria, who died – according to their carbon 14 dating – 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 horsemen. 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 individuals buried in the sarcophagi discovered under Notre-Dame de Paris.
Read alsoMonkeys in nature produce sharp tools similar to those of early humans
“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. The scientists considered that the traces of stress observed correspond to the most primitive technique of the art of horse riding. Evidenced by depictions of horsemen 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 horsemen, 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. “Horsemen were mostly employed to patrol large areas and control larger herds of cattle. cattle and sheep, they add. In short, as summarized for Agence France Presse Martin Trautmann of the University of Helsinki, one 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 horsemen.