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And today I'm talking to William Taylor about his new book, Hoofbeats, how horses shaped human history. Welcome to the podcast, Will. Hey, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. It's great to have you. So I want to start off by asking you to just tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe a little bit of the background that led you to write this book. Yeah, so I am by training an archaeologist, which means that, you know, somebody spends my time looking at animal bones. And, you know, basically from the moment I got interested in archaeology, I've been interested in animals and human animal relationships. And in particular, one of the questions that drew me into this discipline is horses and the domestication of horses, people's relationship with horses. And, you know, the reason for this is being an attractive topic or an interesting topic to me, especially back when I was a young lad. And no longer can claim that, but was the my kind of family history and connection. So, for me, you know, I grew up in Montana, but in a kind of a funny situation, which is that my grandpa was like a classic Montana cowboy or rancher guy. My dad kind of grew up in that world and became a lawyer. And, you know, in the meantime, like my grandpa back in the 20s was riding around on horses and meanwhile, you know, I grew up in a pretty kind of suburban, you know, world in which, you know, the neighbors had horses down the street, but it's not like I really ended up spending a lot of time around the animals growing up. And at the same time, like, actually, I think I might even be able to pull it over into the video screen here. Is this on video or is it only audio. Okay, so imagine a horrific bronze horse lamp, which I now have on my desk here, but it just kind of illustrative of the material culture in the house that I grew up in was like very much like horse culture, you know, tacky cowboy paintings and, you know, harness shaped mirrors and, you know, horse brasses on everything. So, you know, I kind of grew up, you know, we dressed in cowboy boots and hats on a special occasion, but so there's this big, like, contradiction in my life in that like it was part of horse culture, but didn't really understand horses. And so when I got interested in archeology as a student, my first experience actually doing this stuff in a meaningful sense was in Mongolia. And I got kind of involved. I got brought along as an assistant on a project that was looking at really ancient horse culture in the Mongolian steps, the all time mountains and one of the first things I had a chance to do was help excavate a, you know, 2,500 year old burial of a horse. And it was a pretty extraordinary experience for me in that it not only was, you know, oh, I like animals and at school being in Mongolia, but it was this moment of connection to the deeper aspects of the human horse story. And at the same time, I kind of in the process learned all the kinship and similarities and connections I shared with, you know, contemporary Mongolia, and made friends and social connections really easily and I just felt like in the process maybe I was starting to understand some of the deeper, you know, threads of my own kind of family's, you know, story a little bit. And so that really motivated me to explore this topic of archeo zoology and what it tells us about people and horses in the past. And so doing that over the years, I developed an appreciation for just how fast the science world was changing that story. And like everybody else, you know, I read like, you know, David Anthony's horse the wheel and language and was really interested in some of the science that came out but most of the story there. You know, I started to realize, you know, was was a decade or two decades out of date and the, you know, with the advent of, you know, new advances in things like biomolecular sciences and, you know, DNA and some of these tools. We're really shaking up the picture but it hadn't quite been retold, especially not from a more scientifically grounded lens. You know, this is a topic that gets talked about a lot in pop side and history and, you know, even folks, you know, from the, you know, modern kind of sociology or human animal relationships but not from like a deep time in archeological science lens so that I was kind of the motivation for writing the book. I've been wanting to write this for a while, but was never dumb enough to start doing that until the pandemic hit and then I thought, all right, I guess now is the time and, you know, didn't realize, you know, that this process would take, you know, four years of kind of nose to the grindstone working every weekend here but I think that, you know, that was the motivation behind the book. Great. I mean, I think it's interesting to hear about your own background and kind of the wide range of influences because they think that that is really reflected in the really broad scope of the book. So maybe we can talk about that for a minute and I mean, I think one of the things that I felt reading the book was that it's really, I mean, we're talking about all of horse history all around the globe. So could you tell us a little bit about how you went about doing that kind of research to sort of cover that kind of scope. So I think the scope is sort of also reflects kind of my own journey through the topic, which is that, you know, somewhat counterintuitively, I started exploring this topic on the other side of the world. Right. And started, you know, my dissertation work, a lot of my initial scholarship was in the steps of Mongolia. And in the process, right, you know, we had to develop familiarity workflows collaborations that are working with outside the realm of, you know, historical documents or really squeezing, you know, information, almost nothing else other than horse remains themselves. And the process kind of honed, you know, a very flexible and powerful toolkit. And one of the things that, you know, emerged from doing this, mostly through coffee, you know, coffee table conversations is like, well, why have, you know, what does this approach tell us about, you know, horses in the Great Plains, for example, or, you know, it go down to a conference in Argentina and people would have these conversations like, wow, why aren't we talking about this here? And so, you know, I think over time, the, you know, archaeology is especially the archaeozoology is a very small, you know, numerically small group of people. And it's very, very global, you know, folks that are interested in this, you know, you go to a conference and you're going to see somebody from every corner of the world. And so I started end up, ended up spending a lot of time with folks that came from a corner of the world that were impacted in some important way by horses and some of those relationships turned into collaborations, right? So I had a position after grad school, I was working in Germany. And at that time, you know, we started projects that were looking at horse culture in North America, in South America, in Central Asia, China, and some of these different threads. And so, I think the global nature of the book really kind of emerges from the fact that there is a global community of scientists that are all deeply connected to that human horse story. And some of that is, you know, out of my scholarship, but a lot of it is, is just an awareness of the other science that has taken place. Everyone is kind of taking some of these tools and applying them to questions in their own backyard. Because the scope of the impact of horses is truly global in a really, I think, unique way. It's great how the book kind of reflects the process behind it as well. It's interesting. Maybe let's kind of turn a little bit more to the actual kind of, you know, a little bit chapter by chapter of the book, but maybe you could say briefly. I mean, you use this technique of different beats to organize the story. So maybe you could just kind of say briefly how you chose to do that and then we'll use that to kind of structure the rest of the conversation. Yeah, so I mean, it's a bit cheeky, you know, that we've, I don't know, it looks like my thumbs down has been shown up on the screen there. Didn't mean for that to happen. You know, the, the structuring principle of the book is this idea of hoof beats and sort of cheekily has taken, you know, four, you know, sort of key moments in the human horse story and given them. I like the word beat because it reflects, I think, you know, some important distinctions. Each one of these events is, is, you know, in some ways sort of separate and powerful, but also deeply interrelated and connected. And so that was, you know, the structuring metaphor of the book with beats, if you will, a little silly, but I think reflects the speed, the power and interrelatedness of some of these major momentous shifts in the human horse story. And I think the first one that I selected here is kind of that, you know, the evolution of the horse and its relationship with people as a kind of, you know, hunter, hunted situation in many ways, this is the, you know, this is the first beat and the one that took the longest to play out. When we start exploring the human horse relationship we end up, we're talking about like the asteroid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs first and that's a, that's a very deep point in time to start archaeologists, probably not usually starting at like, you know, the Cretaceous paleo gene extinction event but with horses it's actually kind of important because, you know, this is the landscape. In which, you know, the shifting kind of ecological niches of the last 50, 60 million years, kind of brought the primate and ancient horse story, they started off kind of similar. They brought them apart in different ways in terms of, especially horses adapting to the emergence of grasslands which, as we know them now, you know, big, you know, almost kind of homogenous, spacious, open plains type environments. You know, didn't exist per se in the time that, you know, both primates and kind of what we call Don horses, these tiny little three toed skittish creatures that probably not even really eating a diet like we would recognize today. But the emergence of, of those grasslands really shaped horses into the animals that we would recognize today so they developed, you know, specialized dentition and digestive systems for eating really crappy grass. Right, that they kind of necessitated moving around a lot right, they developed, obviously, you know, tremendous size and speed, right, these are related to the demands of surviving predation in the open grasslands and one of the things that I especially thought it was important to point out is, you know, their social dynamics of horses are many ways the most important piece of their relationship with people. They're not just a herd animal in the sense that, you know, developing that cooperative social behavior kind of allowed them to, you know, there's no nowhere to hide in the grasslands, right, and at times over the last, you know, millions of years, there's been some pretty ferocious predators that kind of take advantage of that and so horses developed excellent communication skills very complex social relationships right there great listeners, they keep an eye on a lot of things. And also relationships with each other that eventually would impact how humans were able to kind of step in and manage their, you know, something we would know as like a herd, right, in terms of like, you know, controlling reproductive behavior or having a lead stallion or these, these kinds of things so it is, you know, that initial relationship is deeply rooted in the biology, but it's also rooted in a very, very ancient connection with early environments. And one of the things that I, you know, pointed out in the book is that horses might be the first animal we have really solid evidence for like direct predation by humans by human ancestors and we get this in some pretty striking kind of smoking gun type situations. There's a famous site in Germany known as Schöningen, in which there's wooden spears preserved along with the horses that were hunted on the lake shore. But other early sites show that folks were using horse remains, you know, horse bones, for example, as expedient tools at a very, very ancient time. As we move into time periods we would recognize more as like early modern humans, horses are just almost an obsession of ancient human artists in Eurasia, for example. They're really the most commonly depicted animal in, you know, European cave art, they're showing up in carvings there. And so they're alongside this prey relationship. They were clearly deeply important in world view and artwork and culture. And I just thought it was important to highlight just how interdigitated horses were to ancient human life ways. Pretty much anywhere that horses existed and that extends even to the earliest, you know, indigenous folks in North America and South America too. So horses and their relatives, kind of a key part of life ways wherever they lived up until the landscapes and the environments of the Holocene started to shift and those relationships changed in other ways. So that's kind of, that's the first beat of the book is really just taking us through almost the whole trajectory of human history and showing how deep those connections run with horses. Yeah, thanks. And I think one thing that's, I mean, impressive about the scale of the narrative that you have in the book is also that it highlights kind of the variety of evidence that you have to use to tell this story. I mean, yeah, as you said, there's some points that you start with that are really kind of beyond the general scope of archaeology. And so there's kind of different evidence for how to tell the story that far back in the past. And one of the frustrating parts about being an archaeologist is that the further back you go in time, like the more limited, the kind of information that we still get to work with right so we have this idea of, you know, caveman smashing things with rocks. But that's partly because all that really preserves once you go back a certain amount of time are like fossilized things or actual stone and some of these things and so the degree to which we can explore the richness of that human horse relationship changes. And I think it people have often been left with the implication that is somehow primitive, right, but even in things like bone and stone, you can see aspects of the relationship that go beyond just predation. Right, you can see using, using horses to produce tools, some are you expedient, some are very much, you know, not expedient, but like deeply curated and carefully prepared. And then artwork, right. I mean, these are things that are pretty hard to argue with as, you know, in terms of like primitive or limited and they show that that relationship probably very, very deep and complicated. Absolutely. So let's turn now to the second beat where you have kind of a different array of in some ways richer evidence to talk about kind of the domestication of forces and, and this one you term, the cart, right. So the second beat here seeks to, you know, understand the origins of the domestication relationship, and it does so in a couple different ways. You know, sort of exploring some of the different ideas that have been out there about when and why and how horses were domesticated. And there is a little bit of balloon popping that I do there just based on trying to take, you know, the fresh set of empirical evidence, you know, emerging scholarship, which is, you know, in general, folks have been oriented to roughly the right time and the right place for a very long time that it's, it's clear at a certain point, horses are everywhere in the archaeological record and there's historic documents. And we kind of understand them as a step animal, right. So, although there have been various hypotheses, everyone around the world has kind of at one point thought, hey, maybe we also domesticated the horse ourselves but in general science has been focused on this time period of kind of the Western Eurasian steps for a very long time. But the question is kind of how do we trace domestication? How did it start and what constitutes evidence of this changing relationship? You know, we, there are a lot of questions about what is domestication? Is it with horses? Does that mean when people started riding them? Does it mean other things like meat and milk? And so there's a lot of these. Does it mean control over reproduction? There's all kinds of things that go into the question. And I think one of the things that I think was really emerged in doing the research for hoofbeats is a horse domestication now actually has to be understood as part of a broader trajectory of kind of shifting multi species relationships and a whole host of changing interactions between people and plants and animals in Western Asia across the policy. So when when we start thinking about horse domestication, I actually start talking us through some of the basics around other large animal domestication and how it related to, you know, things like domestication of certain Western Asian grains. And one of the things that is kind of striking to recognize is that the origins of horse transport probably begin with developments in cattle transport, the domestication of the donkey, and kind of a, a very interesting kind of technological and cultural system based in largely in places like Mesopotamia, Egypt, you know, Western Asia outside of the steps in which, you know, beginning in the kind of end of the fourth millennium BC, we have very clear and strong and beautiful documentation of these emerging animal transport systems. So I kind of take us through what this, even even me when I started to look into this was sort of dumbfounded by what some of the new sciences saying around human equity relationships that were outside of the horse and in particular, this incredible science that has now shown that what people were kind of arguing about in the historic record of Mesopotamia where people hybridizing or breeding donkeys with other equids, actually shows up in things like the genomics of some of the animals that have been recovered from archaeological sites. And these animals that sometimes called a kunga, for example, there are a first generation hybrid between a donkey and the Asian wild ass, or what you might call a hemeon. These are animals we, or an oniger, we know these animals, they live across Asia today as a wild animal, but they were part of the shifting set of experimentation, you know, folks trying to bring in other animals into to do things like pull carts, or even these funny little Fred Flintstone type, you know, proto chariot type things. And these, there were centuries of these kind of relationships taking place at the edges of Central Asia. And that is important context to understanding, you know, when and how and why horses made their way into human societies and in the steps. So that, that second beat here really tries to zoom out a little bit when we, when we think and talk about horse domestication, I think a lot of us have been envisioning, you know, a kind of mythological group of step folks, you know, romantically, you know, interacting with horses and maybe deciding maybe now's the day that we're going to, you know, rope and ride one or, and I think we need to understand that that domestication process was part of this whole incredible set of social changes that are almost continental in scale, beginning with the domestication of plants and other animals in Western Asia, you know, 11, 12,000 years ago. I think one of the things that's really great about that beat and the chapters and it is kind of going along with what you've been saying that there's this, this really entangled world of technology and different animals and different plants and these, it's not really like, you know, people are thinking, let me domesticate this animal in order to pull this card, it's sort of like those things kind of work in tandem, you know, that developments in, I mean, the wheel and the card and domesticating cattle and all sorts of things are kind of feeding into each other in a way that's much more complicated than sometimes the narratives that we were in school, you know. Yeah, and with horses in particular, I think we're starting to see that the domestication of the horse took place in the context of folks that already, you know, knew their way around hurting animals. They were already interested in and occupying, you know, grassland environments in a pretty mobile way, but interested in in, you know, and they already knew horses in other ways, right? They continued, you know, to have wild horses be a part of their repertoire of animals that, you know, they engage with for subsistence purposes. So they knew a lot about their environments, they knew a lot about animal transport, and there's still much, much to learn about when and why and how that early domestication happened, in part because now that we have all of these tools at our disposal, the places where science is pointing us towards are places like the Ukrainian war zone, you know, or Western Russia, you know, areas that a lot of the relevant archaeological record is kind of logistically hard to connect with because of the contemporary social reality of science. So, you know, figuring out in detail, you know, the motivation and the mechanics of this process is going to take us years and it's going to require navigating some, some of those situations too. But I think, you know, what we are learning now is that perhaps horse domestication took place a little later than we thought. But by folks that had a lot of context, a lot of existing as you say, you know, very complex interactions in terms of their, you know, pastoral relationships, wild relationships, technology, culture, and each one of those facets probably impacted the process in a certain way. But what that shows us, I think, with the new kind of understanding of horses probably entering into a more sustained sustained level of control by people, really towards the end of the third millennium BC, maybe not super far off from 2000 BC, is that when that transition took place, it wasn't like a gradual, or, you know, a sort of a slow building process, but really something more akin to a lightning strike, something incredibly transformative where within a few hundred years, the ripples were felt in almost every corner of the continent, right? So, I think that, you know, this beat closes here by exploring the ways that that horse domestication really shook up the societies of the ancient world. And my argument is sort of that this process was twofold. One is, in the grassland zones of Eurasia, horses were very transformative as a herd animal. Folks could move around more, right? They could move farther, they could move faster, they could move more easily in terms of both migrations as well as just the day-to-day, you know, moving a herd of livestock across a dry or, you know, desert like grassland landscape. And so horses kind of developed a spread through the temperate and grassland zones of Eurasia through a process of, hey, you know, that would be, it's clear that this is an animal's interesting addition to our life ways and kind of catalyzing things like folks raising horses for meat or this tradition, which is still very, you know, a prevalent and important today, a horse mill could dairy-based pastoralism in a more gentle spread in which they had an important impact on, you know, ecology and economy for folks. But at the same time, there is a much more pernicious element to the horse's initial spread for folks that lived far away from horse country. And I think it would highlight some of the examples, you know, and again, some of these are hard to trace with great detail because they're kind of before detailed historic records, but looks like access to horses, you know, empowered a lot of folks to do things like conquest. In places ranging from, you know, ancient Greece and ancient Egypt to the Indus Valley or the, you know, the area I know best East Asia, so the Shang Dynasty of China. Within a few hundred years, these major, you know, agricultural civilizations were shaken up pretty badly through the actions of, you know, essentially, you know, outsider folks who had access to horses. And initially, this is, some of these have been on the radar of historians and, you know, archaeologists and like for a very long time, but they've often been phrased as Indo-European, right, as though there was some sort of grand association of this process with a particular linguistic and ethnic group. And well, it is true that probably some of the folks that had earliest access to domestic horses did speak Indo-European languages. There are other cases where they clearly did not, right? And I think it was more about horses than about people. And that's what I try to highlight there in the book. Interesting. So let's turn to the third beat then, the rider. And maybe you could also just start by saying a little bit about kind of that separation, that there's kind of one type of relationship that has to do with transport. And then this is, well, I guess, riding is also transport. But yeah, maybe we could talk a little bit about your choice to. Yeah. So, you know, this was an interesting thing for us to think about. For folks that know horses today, probably the main way we know them is through getting on their back. And riding around on them directly. But it's a pretty extraordinary thing to do to a large prey animal. When you think about it, probably one of the most significant predators of horses in their own evolutionary history have been humans. And here we are in a relationship and we're just kind of hopping on their back and gently guiding them around. And so one of the important inflection points here is this transition in how folks are able to control horses. Now, it is probably true that from the very beginning. Not just horses, but any, any equids, and even going back to pre-equid things like cattle, there were situations in which folks would and did get on the back of a horse. So I think people often think of the question of, you know, riding and the origins of riding in a maybe overly simplified way. You could get on if you want, you could hop on the back of a moose or a zebra or any number of animals for a short period of time, right? But the question is what can you effectively do on in a, especially in a high-stakes setting with control of an animal. And at the beginning, you know, archeological record tells us that most of the time for almost a thousand years, folks were using horses primarily in this, you know, sort of chariot transport situation. Now, there'd be a team of animals, you know, you're not on the animals back, you're a little more distant, you have this kind of structure. And it's possible to control animals, even these wild hemeones, with a pretty simple control system, right? So, before there were ever horse carrots, you even had these, you know, donkeys and wild-ass being controlled. A team of four with just nothing but a simple little lip or nose ring, right? And folks will go into battles and be able to control this, you know, somewhat chaotically, probably team of animals. Even in a conflict situation in which, you know, imagine the pandemonium of a, you know, four donkey cart going into some sort of armed conflict. And so when horses were first used for transport, there were innovations right away that allowed these kind of stronger and faster and more ornery animals to be controlled, right? We innovated the mouthpiece system of control, which does not appear anywhere until the first domestic horses and probably had some important role in communication, right? But those initial, you know, systems of technologically, systems of control over horses were pretty rudimentary. They, in many ways, just sort of a piece of rope through the mouth. And so, it is a few centuries before we really see a systematic role for mounted horse riding appearing in any of the documentation or archaeological record that we have. And when they do, you know, for example, I, for the book, I went to some of these grand murals of ancient Egypt, like the one that of Ramses the Great that I highlighted in the book. If you poke along these murals, you can see these huge chariot battle scenes, and then one or two of these little naked guys riding on their horse, and they were probably tasked with certain things that, you know, didn't require a lot of hard stops or right, left turns, but we're like messengers or scouts or this sort of thing. And so, in this third beat here, we kind of follow the technology and transition towards how do we get to the kind of mounted riding that we know today. And some of that was, you know, the science is telling us there were breeding for horses that were a little more tractable, a little less aggressive, right? Some of that was technological, the innovation of more sophisticated mouthpieces, these kind of jointed metal mouthpieces that could do a little more nuanced control. And some of it was probably cultural, right? Folks learning the behavior of the horse in the ways that they could interact and communicate better with the horse. I think one panel I show in the book is the first historical record of cavalry comes out of Assyria in the ninth century BC, and you've got these two fellas riding alongside each other helping each other out. One's holding the reins and the other one's shooting a bow, right? So it's a pretty interesting and complex process, but eventually it gave us a world in which, you know, even to a much greater degree, you know, the dynamics of who had horses really shaped the ancient world. In that beat, I explore the ways that, you know, the origins of horse riding and the innovation of other pieces of technology, like the saddle and the stirrup, which even through some of our own work is now pointing towards places like Mongolia, you know, as a potential origin point for these world shaping technologies. You know, each of these steps in the process really kind of empowering the grassland cultures of the ancient world and kind of elevating them to places of not just military, but like economic and cultural prominence as kind of linking hubs of the ancient world. So this is a piece of the story that's maybe been missing from kind of especially Western scholarship in a place like Mongolia, archaeology shows us things like Roman glass or, you know, this silver platter depicting Hercules, right? So, from the second century BC, we're talking about time periods in which, you know, polities and empires and trade networks and, you know, centers of gravity for the ancient world emerged in the steps, you know, a thousand years before the Mongol Empire, but related to these emerging dynamics and having the most horses, having, you know, this skill in horsemanship, you know, and these, you know, incredible level of control and connectivity across the ancient world and that need for horses also shaping the folks that lived outside of the steps in key ways I kind of walk through the emergence of the formalized networks around the Silk Road, right, and the way that China in particular was just totally boxed in by their need to have a functioning cavalry, right, to have a postal system and some of these things that needed horses but found themselves in kind of a conflict situation with their step neighbors and had to forge trade routes that would link them with places like Central Asia. And I think this has been the thesis of a lot of scholarship lately to kind of explore the driving role of horses in building, you know, inter Asian trade networks, transcontinental trade networks, trade networks into the highlands of the Himalaya and even in the South Asia with this aptly named kind of T-horse road, right, so that rider chapter really tried to explore the ways that riding, you know, emerged in many ways as a step innovation. And at the very least an innovation that really empowered the grassland, you know, areas and cultures of the world, placing them as centers that really connected the continent of Eurasia in particular for the first time in a really powerful way. Great well maybe that's a good segue then to talk about kind of the next kind of the global network when in the last beat you kind of talk about the spread of horses throughout the Pacific and in a way kind of back to the Americas. Yeah, I think, you know, this is in many ways, you know, the most ambitious and there's a lot of different corners of the world that, you know, get combined into this section but it's the one that matters the most to me right as somebody who grew up. I can grow up in the Eurasian steps and here I am thinking of our own culture in, you know, Colorado and Montana as, as a horse culture, kind of follow the ways that horses spread out of the steps and into new environments now some of these dispersals were pretty cool because that's about took place a long time ago right horses reaching the British Isles or Scandinavia or Japan, or even, you know, Iceland and Greenland these these are spread dispersals that took place, you know, in time before we had really this kind of open ocean voyaging that we recognize as having shaped the last 600 years of history. In particular, you know, one of the important spreads there was actually across the Sahara Desert, you know, with the kind of partnership with with camels, for example, and the Islamic, you know, world expanding Islamic world, horses reaching the kind of Sahel region of the, you know, southern margin of the Sahara, in which they gave rise to, you know, really transformative kind of equestrian empires, if you will, in other areas of the world, but, you know, perhaps the most transformative final step in that human horse relationship is the ability of horses to transcend the limitations of the continental landmass, right, and these dispersals that kind of accompanied, you know, European colonial ambitions in the Americas, South Africa, Australasia, the Pacific, and one of the things that I think archaeology is telling us is that, while this has often been thought of as an extension of the colonial narrative, extension, you know, guns, germs and steel, the, you know, horses as part of the glory of European colonialism, I think what one of the things science is telling us is that as horses reach some of these environments, many of which, you know, were kind of ancestrally home to wild horses, for example, like, like North and South America, they really flourished, and they flourished in a way that often had very little to do with the direct actions or impact of European colonial folks, and so in places like Argentina, the Great Plains of North America, you had this very rapid dispersal of horses through indigenous social networks, through their kind of rerouting as a species on the landscape, as well, that really empowered kind of indigenous sovereignty and kind of anti-colonial, you know, military action So, the cavalry record of a place like, you know, colonial Argentina, or the US cavalry, not particularly impressive, in fact it's a story of pretty regular defeats at the hands of really sophisticated and powerful horse cultures for a very, very long time before kind of the, you know, the turning tide of mechanization, you know, other aspects of colonialism and genocide and some of these things eventually kind of spelled the end for that piece and I kind of conclude the book by looking at the ways in which forces have kind of receded, you know, even as they reach this sort of global distribution, even reaching at one point one ill-fated expedition, you know, even reaching the shores of Antarctica, you know, the emergence of kind of mechanized vehicles and automotives, you know, combustion engines, these kind of things That's really the final stage in the most recent parts of the human horse story, and it's sort of shocking how quickly the global footprint of horses has kind of been papered over by that mechanization I say papered over because I think a lot of the legacy and impacts of a world that was so recently almost entirely built on horseback from agriculture, communication, livelihood, you know, military, these kind of things has been sort of replaced with mechanized alternatives, and for a while it wasn't actually true that things like the railroad and industrial economies reduced the importance of horses, they actually increased them for a period of time as, you know, we needed horses to pull heavier things, connect the dots between the emerging railroad, folks will be familiar with things like the Pony Express, right, which was this, you know, very short-lived and wildly ambitious horse-based relay that linked the edges of the railroad system in colonial America, and so all of these things, you know, were extraordinarily pervasive, even in the colonial world until very, very recently I like to point out that, so my own grandfather, not everyone has a grandfather that was born in 1903, but mine was, and so within the span of his life, you know, in just two generations in my family, we went from a world that was all about horses to one in which, you know, I'm driving a motor vehicle to work and I have to, you know, book something online if I want to go ride a horse in my corner of the world but there are many parts of the world in which that's not true, and, you know, for example, every summer in Mongolia, I don't go to Mongolia to ride horses, I go to Mongolia to do archaeological scholarship, but I often end up needing to spend two or three weeks on horseback to get to where we need to be, right, and so there are parts of the world that horses are still filling that day-to-day role in a pretty direct and meaningful way, not just for transport, but for things like meat and milk, and so I think the future of the human horse relationship is complicated and it's not going to look the same everywhere, but I do think in "horse country", you know, and that can include a lot of places, you know, including where I'm sitting right now I think there's a role for horses in the future that is not just restricted to things like, you know, sports or, you know, police breaking up a protest or some of the things that we might see them restricted to in urban environments today and in particular, you know, a lot of my colleagues and partners in places like, you know, the great plains here, native folks, there's a lot of efforts to revitalize, you know, horses and horsemanship as, you know, for their power in ceremony and, you know, youth programs and some of these things too, and so there's, there's a, it's going to be an interesting thing to see where, you know, horses find their role in a rapidly shifting world in the years ahead Maybe just before we wrap up, I mean, you just mentioned some of your collaborators and partners in the Midwest and the Plains, and in the final section of the book, you talk, I mean, you've been talking a little bit about the work that you do in Mongolia and specifically the archaeozoology work that you do, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your research in the Plains, which sounded like it was kind of another way of transforming the narrative of human horse histories Yeah, so when we started, you know, working collaboratively with not just native archaeologists, but also sometimes, you know, tribal historians, elders, folks that know and kind of steward the story of people and horses in this part of the world, we found that, you know, this, in a place like the United States, the story of horses is like one in which, you know, it falls under the purview of history in the sense that there are some written document by some European person that can take us back to the, you know, 1500s or thereabouts, and so it often has been exempted from exploring through other approaches, including archaeology found through that kind of collaborative approach is that for a lot of folks, you know, the story that emerged through kind of a scientific archaeology was actually lining up and validating a perspective that you might get from, you know, oral traditions or tribal historians For example, you know, we found that the pretty solid archaeological evidence that horses spread to places like Wyoming or Idaho, you know, pretty far north in the Rockies of the US, you know, essentially within a few decades of their, you know, becoming entrenched on the continent of North America And in those areas long before you would have had any, you know, documented presence of European people, and so the mechanism through which they spread with this speed and at this antiquity, you know, has to have been through indigenous networks of kind of connectivity and exchange and this sort of thing And so in some cases that has been very powerful validation of things, for example, one of our partners, you know, as a Comanche scholar who pointed out that the ancestral Comanche territory there is the same area where we're finding some of these very, very early evidence of horses They're not just, you know, like a wild horse wandering north but they're horses that are integrated already into ceremony, right? They're horses that are showing evidence of receiving veterinary care, or being used in transport And, you know, lining up with encoded relationships stored even in the language itself that kind of indicates, you know, that, for example, Comanche folks had a relationship with horses before they moved to the southern plains, right? So it might not seem like the most, you know, the trajectory here might be 100 years or 150 years, not the most to an archaeologist, the biggest chronological difference, but extending that relationship in a way that it kind of Some of these more biased perspectives that you're finding in the historical record, validating some of the understandings of sequence and relationship and timing that are found in oral traditions, and kind of establishing that These folks, their relationship with horses is sort of organically their own, right? It's not necessarily a legacy of colonization in the way that it's been framed, even though, you know, these horses, you know, may have been dispersing ultimately from a point of European origin here So I think that's, and what's interesting is that that story is actually echoing even in our findings, for example, from southern Patagonia, in which, you know, the archaeological instances of horses are appearing long before you ever had a documentation of that in a European diary or journal or chronicle, that sort of thing, so I think there's much more to learn through those kind of collaborative approaches, and speaks to the, you know, rapidity and importance of horses in terms of their connection with people all over the world, not just in the steps of Eurasia. Well, great. I mean, I think now that we're kind of running short on time, maybe this is a good time to then just ask you, you know, having now written this book that covers all of the horse and human history. What's your next project? What are you working on now? You know, so I think any reader of hoofbeats will certainly come away with the idea that there's so much more to learn, right? There are many questions that remain unanswered, whether they be from the initial domestication of the horse, all the way up to the absolute last chapters of or most recent chapters of the story, because I'm sure there's many more to be written in the future, but we're working on a few things I think that I think have not quite gotten the attention, especially from an archaeological science perspective that they deserve. So, for example, I have a partnership with Dr. Aquino Gundiran at Northwestern University, who's really interested in exploring the role of horses in West Africa from a more, you know, multidisciplinary archaeological science perspective. We have a project here that's going to start looking at the Pony Express. So, you know, we've done some preliminary inquiries and investigation here and start to kind of apply the science to even the 1860s. Still, there's, I think, a lot we can learn from some of these other, you know, biomolecular techniques and that sort of thing. And, of course, for me, my true, you know, love the place I'm, you know, most deeply connected with is always going to be, I think, the Mongolian steps. And so, you know, we're continuing to do some really exciting work up there in which what we're learning is that the earliest clues to the human horse story. Mongol is a place where archaeological data sets can be hard to come by, especially ones that have good organic material. It's a, you know, harsh environment. There's not a lot of things like floodplain deposition or classic archaeological sites. And so we've been doing this project. We're looking at high mountain snow and ice and finding, in fact, you know, clues to the earliest horse, you know, domestic horses emerging melting out of, you know, mountain glaciers and snow and ice patches. And so that's what we spent our summer doing and some pretty exciting results, you know, to hold the, you know, mummified remains of the first horse horses in the Eastern step. And so that's what we'll be working on going forward. Well, it sounds like all very exciting lines of research and hopefully there'll be many books out of them that we can talk about on the new books that work in the future. Yeah, whenever hoof beats volume two comes up. Well, great. Thank you so much for talking with me today. And just again, the book is hoof beats how horses shaped human history by William Taylor. Thanks so much. [Music]
