No longer does human society depend on horse society for survival as it once did. ![]() In addition to genetics, this presentation will focus on the socialization aspect of raising horses, and portray the importance of nurture on the eventual behavioral and physical health of the adult athlete. In contemporary culture, selective breeding often involves selecting for the best athlete, or attempting to select for the best athlete. It appears to have taken tens of thousands of years to fully domesticate the horse, and to eventually attain control of breeding. Breeding initially consisted primarily of selection for docility and amenability to captivity, and later milking, riding, driving, and stabling. All of today’s caballine horses are descended from an original, and possibly separate, population of horses that were amenable to being tamed and selectively bred by humans. Rather than plucking wild horses out of the wild and taming them, it is thought that over tens of thousands of years a relationship developed in a shared niche.īy the early 20th century the closest living relative to Equus caballus, the Tarpan, had gone extinct. A population of horses more amenable to captivity and taming than their wild counterparts likely provided the stock for the first horse societies. Both trained and wild horses existed in this realm south of Russia and west of China. ![]() Horses apparently became domesticated because they found a niche with people long ago on the steppes of Kazakhstan. To understand the domestication process is to enhance our appreciation of equine behaviour. It is interesting to note that large domestic dogs lived with these early horsefolk as well, but no other domestic animals. Horses provided these early horsefolk with much of the essentials they needed for group survival. There is archeological evidence that humans had formed an intimate and intermingled relationship with horses by 5500 years ago in Botai, where the horsefolk stabled and milked horses, and probably rode them. A shared language described by contemporary scientists as kinetic empathy, a language of movement, and similar compatible social structures facilitated the merging of the two species. But it was not until perhaps ten thousand years ago that human societies began the dance of domestication with the horse. Over thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands of years, the horse herds gradually merged with human societies. ![]() Three million years ago the footsteps of humans were fossilized next to the hoofprints of horses, suggesting that humans have been contemplating horses for some time. Horses began their journey through time 60 million years ago.
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