NOVA: The First Horse Warriors

[DShomshak]

From the Riders of Rohan to the Dothraki, horse-centered cultures have long been a staple of fantasy. This episode of the public TV program NOVA looks into how humans came to domesticate horses, and the impact on history. Good information here to help in designing and portraying your setting's horse-based culture.

 

Coolest thing: It appears horses were first domesticated in what is now Kazakhstan, by a culture archeologists now call the Botai. Since the Botai were not literate (and neither was anybody else at the time), they remain deeply mysterious. And the greatest mystery may be what happened to them. They seemed to be quite successful for a while, with relatively large villages... before they just vanish.

 

But they must have left descendants, right? Wrong: DNA extracted from a rare Botai skeleton doesn't match that of anyone now living in Central Asia, and maybe anywhere. What killed them? Or where did they go? If you can't create a Fantasy explanation for that, you should turn in your dice.

 

As a coda, what happened to the Botai horses? The archeologists expected they were the ancestors of all domesticated horses: The Botai themselves died out (or whatever), but other people would see how useful horses were and pick up the custom, and breeding stock. Nope! The only modern descendants of Botai horses are the Przewalski (I hope I'm spelling that right) orses -- the so-called "last wild horses" of central Asia. Turns out, they are domesticated Botai horses that went wild again.

 

Another culture, dubbed the Yamnaya, domesticated horses again c. 3500-3000 BCE and promptly spread across Eurasia, bringing cavalry warfare, the Proto-Indo-European language... and bubonic plague. If you are of European descent, your genome is 50% Yamnaya. They were very good at population replacement.

 

All in all, an excellent show.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

 

[Toxxus]

Firstly, really cool information.  Thanks for the post.

 

Secondly, they probably vanished in the manner typical of ancient societies.  They chose from the great list of extinction events.

1-  They got sick and died via some sort of plague.

2-  Famine struck and they starved to death.

3-  Another group attacked and slew them all.

4-  They fell into civil war and annihilated each other.

 

 

[Tjack]

    I saw this, a great episode.  

    Nova is a wonderful resource for fantasy gamers and GM’s. From the episode on the secrets of forging Viking swords to the one about the terra-cotta warriors of China it’s all grist for the mill.