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Domestication of horses 50,000 years ago?


Big Bad Voodoo

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I remember reading a book on human origins by Richard Leakey that stated equines were being kept dating back to forty thousand years. This book was published at least as far back as the 1970's so this not new news. That this find was found in the cave where the remains of the Denisovians were found is highly important linking humans and horses so early.

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After all these years, you would think we would have learned that horses are more important to us than just a small commodity. It's a shame as to how they are sometimes treated.

If you live in the United States, please support the legislation to ban horse slaughter: H.R. 1094: Safeguard American Food Exports Act of 2013 and S. 541: Safeguard American Food Exports Act of 2013

And, please don't forget that the BLM is rounding up all of our wild horses into oblivion :(

thanks for listening - yea, I'm a horse fanatic :)

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After all these years, you would think we would have learned that horses are more important to us than just a small commodity. It's a shame as to how they are sometimes treated.

If you live in the United States, please support the legislation to ban horse slaughter: H.R. 1094: Safeguard American Food Exports Act of 2013 and S. 541: Safeguard American Food Exports Act of 2013

And, please don't forget that the BLM is rounding up all of our wild horses into oblivion :(

thanks for listening - yea, I'm a horse fanatic :)

Dont think you are allowed to post this?

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Really? Why? :(

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Really? Why? :(

Your legislation support suggestion could be interpreted as violating 1e, below:

1. No spamming Common forms of forum spam include but are not limited to:

  • 1a. Advertising: Do not use the forum to advertise a product, site or service.
  • 1b. Recruitment: Do not recruit or invite members in to joining other sites, groups, services or forums.
  • 1c. Cross-posting: Do not cross-post the same content across multiple threads/sections.
  • 1d. Thread bumping: Do not post 'bump' messages solely to return a thread to the top of the topic index.
  • 1e. Participation requests: Do not ask members to take part in offsite surveys, petitions, contests, campaigns or fundraisers.

cormac

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If further research establishes it to be the latter, it would pre-date the earliest known domestication of horses, in Kazakhstan, by more than 44,000 years.

http://siberiantimes...0000-years-ago/

The Al Maqar Site in Saudi Arabia already predates the Kazakhstan claims by at least 3500 years.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/2601546/archaeologists-uncover-ancient-site-in-saudi-arabia/

cormac

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I don't think I fall into any of those categories. At least I don't think so! :)

I did not do any of these things: Participation requests: Do not ask members to take part in offsite surveys, petitions, contests, campaigns or fundraisers.

or the others.

I'm just brining the plight of innocent horses to the publics attention and how they could help. I think others have done that on these forums :)

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I don't think I fall into any of those categories. At least I don't think so! :)

I did not do any of these things: Participation requests: Do not ask members to take part in offsite surveys, petitions, contests, campaigns or fundraisers.

or the others.

I'm just brining the plight of innocent horses to the publics attention and how they could help. I think others have done that on these forums :)

by saying people should support the legislation you are asking them to take part in a campaign.... Edited by billyf
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Hmmm I don't see it as a campaign but ok.

So if I just say horses are sentient beings and should be treated as such that's ok. Yes?

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I think all beings are sentient, some more than others.

Doesn't keep me from eating them though.

Re this find, it's fantastic. Hope it pans out.

Harte

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@MJNYC thanks for that, I have been campaigning for better treatment of horses, particularly ex race horses since I was 8 years old.

While it may be seen as suggesting others take part in a petition/campaign, I think this occasion is fairly benign. It might be slightly bending the rules a little, however people can simply ignore it if they wish.

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by saying people should support the legislation you are asking them to take part in a campaign....

It's a legislative bill before the House of Representatives, it's not an offsite survey, petition, contest, campaign or fundraiser.

Anyways, it's fascinating to think about domesticated horses 50,000 years ago. I'm imagining mounted homo sapiens pursuing neanderthals. Yeah, I'm wierd like that.

Edited by redhen
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Thanks EtherialNight and Redhen! Appreciate it!

So many people don't know the plight of our horses, but they really love horses. So I thought, why not spread the word a bit. If this keeps up we won't have any wild horses left.

And exactly, Etherial. Exceller and Ferdinand both slaughtered for their meat. Ferdinand slaughtered in Japan and I heard there was a sign on the restaurant "come dine on a champion". Now if that doesn't make you sick, what does?

And, I agreed, Redhen, thinking about them riding horses so long ago made me think that if this bond is so long, why are we still so barbaric towards our equine friends.

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  • 1 year later...

http://www2.canada.c...html?id=6351335 An interesting article about finding a rare BIG Pleistocene horse skull in the Yukon. Most prehistoric horses were barely small pony sized while this horse was plenty big enough for domestication although there is very little proof of domestication.

"The fossil that stood out the most, however, was the skull of a horse that had lived in the Arctic during the last Ice Age.

This was not the typical small Yukon horse that Froese and other paleontologists had found here and in other regions of the Arctic. This was a huge animal - a Clydesdale next to an Icelandic pony - that would have probably had an easier time outrunning scimitar cats, American lions and short-faced bears that prowled this ancient world around the same time.

"The fossils of horses like these show up rarely in North America," says Froese, who considers himself to be a geologist rather than a paleontologist."

*Snip*

Yukon- See more at: http://uofa.ualberta...13/june/yuko...

One of the reasons why this large Pleistocene horse is especially curious is that there has been a fringe group arguing that horses were domesticated up to 350,000 years ago as opposed to the mainstream view of 6,000 years ago. Probably the biggest argument against the ancient horse domestication was that existing horses were too small.

Shards of pottery with traces of mare's milk, mass gravesites for horses, and drawings of horses with plows and chariots: These are some of the signs left by ancient people hinting at the importance of horses to their lives. But putting a place and date on the domestication of horses has been a challenge for archaeologists. Now, a team of geneticists studying modern breeds of the animal has assembled an evolutionary picture of its storied past.

Horses, the scientists conclude, were first domesticated 6000 years ago in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe, modern-day Ukraine and West Kazakhstan. And as the animals were domesticated, they were regularly interbred with wild horses, the researchers say.

"This is a very good paper," says biologist Michael Hofreiter of the University of York in the United Kingdom. "Nobody has applied this method of population modeling to horses before." Throughout their history, horses have been interbred, traded between populations of people, and moved across continents. All of this makes their genetic history hard to follow.

Moreover, the wild ancestor of horses, Equus ferus, is extinct, complicating researchers' efforts to compare the genetics of domestic animals with wild ones. Previous research nailed down a broad area—the Eurasian Steppe, which stretches from Hungary and Romania through Mongolia—as the region where horses originated and were domesticated.

But earlier genetic studies relied mostly on mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from a mother, to try to understand horses' evolutionary history. "The problem was that there was a lot of diversity in the mitochondrial DNA," says biologist Vera Warmuth of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the first author of the new study. And the diversity didn't group the horses into their breed or place of origin. "Every horse breed has almost all the mitochondrial lineages represented," she says. Warmuth instead studied sequences of horse DNA inherited from both parents and known to be diverse between horse populations.

She and her colleagues collected genetic samples from more than 300 horses at 12 different sites across the steppe. Data were collected for only working animals bred within a local area, not those bred for show or appearance, to minimize any human-guided selection that would make some genes more common. Then, the researchers used computer programs designed to model the spread of a population to simulate how different locations of horse domestication and spread throughout the steppe would influence modern genetic diversity.

They compared each model with the real data they had collected to see which fit best. The best-fit model, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed the wild ancestor of domestic horses originating in eastern Eurasia 160,000 years ago and being domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe around 6000 years ago.

The model also helped explain why there had been so many female lineages when previous studies had tried to rely on mitochondrial DNA. "We think that as domestic horses spread out of the western steppe, local wild females were continuously incorporated into the spreading herds," says Warmuth. The constant addition of new females made the genetic patterns—in particular, the female lineages—more complex than if the domestic population had been totally isolated.

Hofreiter is impressed. "They have still only narrowed down the domestication region to a fairly big area," he says, "but they did have enough genetic data to get a signal out of the noise." Not all researchers are convinced, however.

Archaeologist Marsha Levine of the University of Cambridge thinks using modern genetic samples to retrace horses' evolution is a dead end.

"There's been mixing of cultures and mixing of horses in this region for many thousands of years," she says. "And so when you're looking at any modern horse, you just don't know where it's from." Bringing together many kinds of evidence is what will ultimately answer the whens and wheres of horse domestication, Levine says.

"What we need to be doing is using material from excavations, sequencing ancient genes, and combining that with what we know from archaeological evidence about how animals were used in the past." Ultimately, says Hofreiter, getting to the bottom of horse domestication will reveal more than just the history of these animals. "Horse domestication has changed human cultures a lot. It has changed warfare, it has changed transportation," he says. "Studying the past of horses can tell us a lot about our own past." Thanks for Science Mag for this article.

The next section begins the discussion we had a couple of years ago about evidence of horse domestication 350,000 years ago

Virginia Steen McIntyre, who you will know from her site at Valsequillo in Mexico, has just sent us this. It is an engraving of a horse on a bone which could be as much 350,000 years old. Virginia asks: "What does that tell us about palaeo smarts?" And we could add to that, what does this tell us about when man was first in the Americas?

I had a chance to view your website yesterday and thought you might be interested in the Atepitzingo horse's head from the Valsequillo area of east central Mexico (series of images attached.) Engraved on a fossilized proboscidian bone. A nearby horse metapodial has been dated around 250,000 - 350,000 years (U-series dates), similar to other dates for artifacts from the area (Hueyatlaco and El Horno sites.)

The figures are from Juan Armenta's 1978 monograph, Figures 75 and 76, with an overlay by my husband, Dave, after being alerted by Chris Hardaker to the "buried" horse head image...

First look at the b/w photo of the specimen, then at the careful drawing of same, then at the drawing plus overlay. Once you see the horse's head, you can never again NOT see it! What does that say about paleo-smarts?

Here is an introduction to the specimen:

INTRODUCTION, TEPITZINGO 1

The following images are of Armenta's engraved bone Atepitzingo 1(Figures 75 and 76 of his 1978 monograph). In September 2005, late at night, archaeologist Christopher Hardaker was looking at the illustration and suddenly saw a beautiful horse's head with what might be some kind of band across its nose. Armenta certainly didn't see it when he so carefully copied the lines in the engraving. Neither did Cynthia Irwin-Williams. Neither did others who reviewed Armenta's publication these past 25-plus years! At least no one has commented on it.

Photo of horse engraved on bone

Horse.jpg

Overlay of horse

Horseoverlay.jpg

Edited by Still Waters
Removed copyrighted image
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Nothing wrong with eating horses. They are an animal just like any other. :)

On topic. Cool find. I hope this proves to be true. :D

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