About ancient horse riders - imaginary and real (Commentary to the article “First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship” by Martin Trautmann et al.) (original) (raw)

A detailed commentary is given on the article "First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship" by Martin Trautmann et al. It is shown that the authors' conclusions about the early appearance of horse riding in the Yamnaya culture look unrealistic, since they do not take into account a number of factors, including: 1) Thousands of years before horses were domesticated, there was a real possibility of riding oxen and cows; 2) For horsemanship until the end of the 3rd millennium BC there were no conditions, including genetic ones, and there was no documentary evidence of real horsemanship; 3) Bioanthropological analysis of 21 features, carried out by A. Buzhilova on a representative sample from the central, rather than peripheral, region of the Yamnaya culture, led her to the conclusion that there were no traces of horsemanship on the skeletons of individuals until the end of the Bronze Age. The authors ignored this result and carried out their analysis only on 6 characteristics; 4) There is bioanthropological data on the movement of people of the Yamnaya culture not on horseback, but on foot during migrations; 5) The meat and sometimes dairy purpose of horses ("live canned food") has been precisely established; 6) There is another significant need for using horses: not for riding, but for obtaining food from under the snow for all other animals from the herd in harsh winters; 7) The individuals studied in the article, taking into account their height and weight, were physiologically unable to ride early horses; 8) The purely utilitarian purpose of the horse in the Yamnaya culture is confirmed by the absence of its cult images. This is in sharp contrast both to some earlier Neolithic and Eneolithic cultures, and to later ones that existed after the domestication of the horse at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. At the same time, we have shown that the cult of the horse in Indo-European cultures and the appearance of scepters with the image of a horse's head are not directly related to the early horsemanship assumed by the authors, but are most likely associated with religious ideas and have direct analogies (like some other cultural and religious markers Indo-Europeans) even in previous cultures of the northern Mesolithic, in the form of the cult of the Heavenly Elk or the Heavenly Moose, using the corresponding scepters with the image of an elk's head.