Bones, bridles and bits – but where’s the horse?

The German cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff has written that horses have as many meanings as bones. In the archaeologist William Taylor’s new history of horses and humans, we meet all those bones. Found in thawing permafrost, in caves, and buried ceremonially in graves in Siberia and Chile, the bones are cracked open by Taylor to show how the horse evolved in the Americas before its early encounters with human hunters.

Then came domestication, transforming the species from near extinction to tool and symbol on every major landmass on the planet. After that, horses and their keepers created empires, paced epically long trade routes – and brought plague from the steppes. There is not much in Hoof Beats from contemporary textual sources and little about later chunks of horse history, but Taylor writes clearly and compellingly. He is not one for evocative recreations of past scenes, but the species’ grave goods throw up astonishing details – the hoof prints still preserved in Rameses the Great’s stables; the 3,000-year-old hoof parings from a kind of ghillie’s pony found in the Altai mountains; the horse grease on a Viking sail.

Once the domestic horse arrived, be it in Bulgaria, Lesotho, Korea or Patagonia, locals used it to hunt, fight, trade, farm and herd, and societies are transformed. Hoof Beats shows how feral colonial horses were rapidly adopted by indigenous people and used to resist Europeans across the entire American continent, in Australasia and southern Africa. Taylor co-authored a study that confirmed Native American oral traditions that horses reached the American West before human colonists did and were tamed by the Comanche and others without European influence.

This kind of materially backed insight is more Taylor’s style than sweeping narratives or Casaubon-ish attempts to link up Indo-European myths of white horses and ritual sacrifices.