Archaeologists unearth one of earliest known frame saddles

In April 2015, looters sacked an ancient cave burial at a site called Urd Ulaan Uneet high within the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia. When police apprehended the criminals, they uncovered, among other artifacts, an elegantly carved saddle made from several pieces of birch wood.

Now, in a new study, researchers from Mongolia collaborating with University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist William Taylor have described the find. The team's radiocarbon dating pins the artifact to roughly the 4th Century C.E., making it one of the earliest known frame saddles in the world.

"It was a watershed moment in the technological history of people and horses," said Taylor, corresponding author of the new study and curator of archaeology at the CU Museum of Natural History.

He and his colleagues, including scientists from 10 countries, published their findings Dec. 12 in the journal Antiquity.

The research reveals the underappreciated role that ancient Mongolians played in the spread of horse riding technology and culture around the globe. Those advances ushered in a new and sometimes brutal era of mounted warfare around the same time as the fall of the Roman Empire.

The discovery also highlights the deep relationships between human and animals in Mongolia. For millennia, pastoral peoples have traveled between the vast grasslands of the Mongolian Steppe with their horses -- which, in the region, tend to be short but sturdy, capable of surviving winter temperatures that can plummet far below freezing. Airag, a lightly alcoholic beverage made from fermented horse milk, remains a popular libation in Mongolia.

"Ultimately, technology emerging from Mongolia has, through a domino effect, ended up shaping the horse culture that we have in America today, especially our traditions of saddlery and stirrups," Taylor said.

But these insights also come at a time when Mongolia's horse culture is beginning to disappear, said study lead author Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan.

"Horses have not only influenced the history of the region but also left a deep mark on the art and worldview of the Nomadic Mongols," said Bayarsaikhan, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. "However, the age of technology is slowly erasing the culture and use of horses. Instead of herders riding horses, more and more people are riding motorcycles in the plains of Mongolia."

Mounted combat

Bayarsaikhan was working as a curator at the National Museum of Mongolia when he and his colleagues got the call from police in Hovd Province. The team later excavated the Urd Ulaan Uneet cave and unearthed the mummified remains of a horse, which the group partially described in a 2018 paper.

The saddle itself was made from about six pieces of birch wood held together with wooden nails. It bears traces of red paint with black trim and includes two leather straps that likely once supported stirrups. (The researchers also reported an iron stirrup recently discovered from around the same time period in eastern Mongolia).

The group couldn't definitively trace back where those materials came from. Birch trees, however, grow commonly in the Mongolian Altai, suggesting that locals had crafted the saddle themselves, not traded for it.

Taylor explained that humans had used pads, a form of proto-saddle, to keep their rear ends comfortable on horseback since the earliest days of mounted riding. Rigid wooden saddles, which were much sturdier, paired with stirrups opened a new range of things that people could do with horses.

"One thing they very gave rise to was heavy cavalry and high-impact combat on horseback," Taylor said. "Think of jousting in Medieval Europe."

Traveling west

In the centuries after the Mongolian saddle was crafted, these types of tools spread rapidly west across Asia and into the early Islamic world. There, cavalry forces became key to conquest and trade across large portions of the Mediterranean region and northern Africa.

Where it all began, however, is less clear. Archaeologists have typically considered modern-day China the birthplace of the first frame saddles and stirrups -- with some finds dating back to the 5th to 6th Century C.E. or even earlier.

The new study, however, complicates that picture, Taylor said.

"It's not the only piece of information suggesting that Mongolia might have been either among the very first adopters of these new technologies -- or could, in fact, be the place where they were first innovated," he said.

He suspects that Mongolia's place in that history may have gone underappreciated for so long in part because of the region's geography. The population density in the country's mountainous expanses is low, among the lowest on Earth, making it difficult to encounter and analyze important archaeological finds.

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New, exhaustive study probes hidden history of horses in the American West

A team of international researchers has dug into archaeological records, DNA evidence and Indigenous oral traditions to paint what might be the most exhaustive history of early horses in North America to date. The group's findings show that these beasts of burden may have spread throughout the American West much faster and earlier than many European accounts have suggested.

The researchers, including several scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder, published their findings today in the journal Science.

To tell the stories of horses in the West, the team closely examined about two dozen sets of animal remains found at sites ranging from New Mexico to Kansas and Idaho. The researchers come from 15 countries and multiple Native American groups, including the Lakota, Comanche and Pawnee nations.

"What unites everyone is the shared vision of telling a different kind of story about horses," said William Taylor, a corresponding author of the study and curator of archaeology at the CU Museum of Natural History. "Focusing only on the historical record has underestimated the antiquity and the complexity of Indigenous relationships with horses across a huge swath of the American West."

For many of the scientists involved, the research holds deep personal significance, added Taylor, who grew up in Montana where his grandfather was a rancher.

"We're looking at parts of the country that are extraordinarily important to the people on this project," he said.

The researchers drew on archaeozoology, radiocarbon dating, DNA sequencing and other tools to unearth how and when horses first arrived in various regions of today's United States. Based on the team's calculations, Indigenous communities were likely riding and raising horses as far north as Idaho and Wyoming by at least the first half of the 17th Century -- as much as a century before records from Europeans had suggested.

Groups like the Comanche, in other words, may have begun to form deep bonds with horses mere decades after the animals arrived in the Americas on Spanish boats.

The results line up with a wide range of Indigenous oral histories.

"All this information has come together to tell a bigger, broader, deeper story, a story that natives have always been aware of but has never been acknowledged," said Jimmy Arterberry, co-author of the new study and tribal historian of the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma.

Study co-author Carlton Shield Chief Gover agreed, noting that the love of horses may be one thing that extends across societies and borders.

"People are fascinated by horses. They've grown up with horses," said Shield Chief Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and curator for public anthropology at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. "We can talk to one another through our shared love of an animal."

Mud Pony

For many Native American communities that shared love goes a long way back.

The Pawnee, for example, tell the story of "Mud Pony," a boy who began seeing visions of strange creatures in his sleep.

"He makes these little mud figurines of these animals he sees in his dreams, and, overnight, they become alive," Shield Chief Gover said. "That's how you get horses."

European historical records from the colonial period, however, have tended to favor a more recent origin story for horses in the West. Many scholars have suggested that Native American communities didn't begin caring for horses until after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. During this event, Pueblo people in what is today New Mexico temporarily overthrew Spanish rule, releasing European livestock in the process.

Taylor, also an assistant professor of anthropology at CU Boulder, and his colleagues didn't think it fit as an origin story for the relationships between humans and horses in the West: "We thought: There's something fishy about this story."

Clues in bone

With funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), they formed an equine dream team that includes archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma and University of New Mexico. Geneticist Ludovic Orlando and Lakota scholar Yvette Running Horse Collin took part from the University of Toulouse.

"This research demonstrates how multiple different types of data can be integrated to address the fascinating historical question of how and when horses spread across the West," said NSF Archaeology program director John Yellen.

The researchers began collecting as much data as they could on horses remains from the West. DNA evidence, for example, suggests that most Indigenous horses had descended from Spanish and Iberian horses, with British horses becoming more common in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

"Our analyses show it was born and raised locally," Taylor said. "It was cared for, and when that animal passed, there was extraordinary significance to that event."

The remains of this horse, along with several others from the study, also seemed to date back to around the turn of the 17th Century, decades before the start of the Pueblo Revolt.

How animals like it arrived in Wyoming isn't clear, but it's likely that Europeans weren't involved in their initial transport.

Shield Chief Gover explained that few Indigenous people will be surprised by the results of the study. But the team's findings may help to illustrate for academic scientists just how important these animals were to the history of Indigenous peoples. The Pawnee, who lived in Nebraska, for example, rode horses on twice-a-year buffalo hunts, traveling farther and faster into the "sea of grass" of the Great Plains. Comanche also galloped on horseback to hunt buffalo, while owning a lot of horses was a sign of wealth.

"I don't want to diminish the reverence and the respect we have for horses," Arterberry said. "We see them as gifts the Creator gave us, and, because of that, we survived and thrived and became who we are today."

Respecting horses

Study co-author Chance Ward, a master's student in Museum and Field Studies at CU Boulder, would like to see the archaeology community begin to treat those relationships with more respect. He was born and raised on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, which is home to four bands of the Lakota Nation. Ward grew up listening to his mother's childhood stories about riding ponies in the Bear Creek community. His father's parents started a ranch on the reservation where members of the family practice rodeo today.

He explained that many researchers don't handle animal remains with the same care they reserve for cultural objects and human remains.

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The world's first horse riders

The researchers discovered evidence of horse riding by studying the remains of human skeletons found in burial mounds called kurgans, which were between 4500-5000 years old. The earthen burial mounds belonged to the Yamnaya culture. The Yamnayans had migrated from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to find greener pastures in today´s countries of Romania and Bulgaria up to Hungary and Serbia.

Yamnayans were mobile cattle and sheep herders, now believed to be on horseback.

"Horseback-riding seems to have evolved not long after the presumed domestication of horses in the western Eurasian steppes during the fourth millennium BCE. It was already rather common in members of the Yamnaya culture between 3000 and 2500 BCE," says Volker Heyd, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki and a member of the international team, which made the discovery.

These regions west of the Black Sea constitute a contact zone where mobile groups of herdsmen from the Yamnaya culture first encountered the long-established farmer communities of Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic traditions. For decades, the Early Bronze Age expansion of steppe people into southeastern Europe was explained as a violent invasion.

With the advent of ancient DNA research, the differences between these migrants from the east and members of local societies became even more pronounced.

"Our research is now beginning to provide a more nuanced picture of their interactions. For example, findings of physical violence as were expected are practically non-existent in the skeletal record so far. We also start understanding the complex exchange processes in material culture and burial customs between newcomers and locals in the 200 years after their first contact," explains Bianca Preda-Bălănică, another team member from the University of Helsinki.

Horse riding is a pivotal moment in human history

The use of animals for transport, in particular the horse, marked a turning point in human history. The considerable gain in mobility and distance had profound effects on land use, trade, and warfare. Current research has mostly focused on the horses themselves. However, horse-riding is an interaction of two components -- the mount and its rider -- and human remains are available in larger numbers and more complete condition than early horse remains. Since horseback riding is possible without specialized equipment, the absence of archaeological finds with regard to earliest horsemanship does not come unexpected.

Traces of horsemanship can be found in the skeletons

"We studied over 217 skeletons from 39 sites of which about 150 found in the burial mounds belong to the Yamnayans. Diagnosing activity patterns in human skeletons is not unambiguously. There are no singular traits that indicate a certain occupation or behavior. Only in their combination, as a syndrome, symptoms provide reliable insights to understand habitual activities of the past.," explains Martin Trautmann, Bioanthropologist in Helsinki and the lead author of the study.

The international team decided to use a set of six diagnostic criteria established as indicators of riding activity (the so-called "horsemanship syndrome"):

1. Muscle attachment sites on pelvis and thigh bone (femur);

2. Changes in the normally round shape of the hip sockets;

3. Imprint marks caused by pressure of the acetabular rim on the neck of the femur;

4. The diameter and form of the femur shaft;

5. Vertebral degeneration caused by repeated vertical impact;

6. Traumata that typically can be caused by falls, kicks or bites from horses.

To increase the diagnostic reliability, the team also used a stricter filtering method and developed a scoring system that takes into account the diagnostic value, distinctiveness and reliability of each symptom. Altogether, out of the 156 adult individuals of the total sample at least 24 (15.4%) can be classified as 'possible riders', while five Yamnaya and two later as well as two possibly earlier individuals qualify as 'highly probable riders'. "The rather high prevalence of these traits in the skeleton record, especially with respect to the overall limited completeness, show that these people were horse riding regularly," Trautmann states.

If the primary use of horseback riding was as a convenience in a mobile pastoral lifestyle, in allowing a more effective herding of cattle, as means of swift and far-ranging raids or just as symbol of status needs further research.

Could it all have happened even earlier?

"We have one intriguing burial in the series" remarks David Anthony, emeritus Professor of Hartwick College USA and also senior co-author in the study.

"A grave dated about 4300 BCE at Csongrad-Kettöshalom in Hungary, long suspected from its pose and artifacts to have been an immigrant from the steppes, surprisingly showed four of the six riding pathologies, possibly indicating riding a millennium earlier than Yamnaya. An isolated case cannot support a firm conclusion, but in Neolithic cemeteries of this era in the steppes, horse remains were occasionally placed in human graves with those of cattle and sheep, and stone maces were carved into the shape of horse heads. Clearly, we need to apply this method to even older collections."

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Walking and slithering aren't as different as you think

Abrahamic texts treat slithering as a special indignity visited on the wicked serpent, but evolution may draw a more continuous line through the motion of swimming microbes, wriggling worms, skittering spiders and walking horses.

A new study found that all of these kinds of motion are well represented by a single mathematical model.

"This didn't come out of nowhere -- this is from our real robot data," said Dan Zhao, first author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a recent Ph.D. graduate in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.

"Even when the robot looks like it's sliding, like its feet are slipping, its velocity is still proportional to how quickly it's moving its body."

Unlike the dynamic motion of gliding birds and sharks and galloping horses -- where speed is driven, at least in part, by momentum -- every bit of speed for ants, centipedes, snakes and swimming microbes is driven by changing the shape of the body. This is known as kinematic motion.

The expanded understanding of kinematic motion could change the way roboticists think about programming many-limbed robots, opening new possibilities for walking planetary rovers, for instance.

Shai Revzen, professor of electrical and computer engineering at U-M and senior author of the study, explained that two- and four-legged robots are popular because more legs are extremely complex to model using current tools.

"This never sat well with me because my work was on cockroach locomotion," Revzen said. "I can tell you many things about cockroaches. One of them is that they're not brilliant mathematicians."

And if cockroaches can walk without solving extremely complex equations, there has to be an easier way to program walking robots. The new finding offers a place to start.

Slipping feet complicates typical motion models for robots, and the assumption was that it might add an element of momentum to the motion of many-legged robots. But in the model reported by the U-M team, it is not so different from lizards that "swim" in sand or microbes swimming in water.

Because microbes are small, the water seems a lot thicker and stickier -- as if a human was trying to swim in honey. In all of these cases, the limbs move through the surrounding medium, or slide over a surface, rather than being connected at a stationary point.

The team discovered the connection by taking a known model that describes swimming microbes and then reconfiguring it to use with their multi-legged robots. The model reliably reflected their data, which came from multipods -- modular robots that can operate with 6 to 12 legs -- and a six-legged robot called BigAnt.

The team also collaborated with Glenna Clifton, assistant professor of biology at the University of Portland in Oregon, who provided data on ants walking on a flat surface. While the robot legs slip a lot -- up to 100% of the time for the multipods -- ant feet have much firmer connections with the ground, slipping only 4.7% of the time.

Even so, the ants and robots followed the same equations, with their speeds proportional to how quickly they moved their legs. It turned out that this kind of slipping didn't alter the kinematic nature of the motion.

As for what this suggests about how walking evolved, the team points to the worm believed to be the last common ancestor for all creatures that have two sides that are mirror images of each other. This worm, wriggling through water, already had the foundations of the motion that enabled the first animals to walk on land, they propose. Even humans begin learning to propel ourselves kinematically, crawling on hands and knees with the three points of contact on the ground at any time.

The skills of managing momentum -- running with four legs or fewer, walking or running on two legs, flying or gliding -- ladder on top of that older knowledge about how to move, the researchers suggest.

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Oldest DNA from domesticated American horse lends credence to shipwreck folklore

Feral horses have roamed freely across the island of Assateague off the coast of Maryland and Virginia for hundreds of years, but exactly how they got there has remained a mystery. In a new study, ancient DNA extracted from a 16th century cow tooth from one of Spain's first Caribbean colonies turns out to be from a horse. Analysis of the DNA suggest that old folk tales claiming that horses were marooned on Assateague following the shipwreck of a Spanish galleon are likely more fact than fiction.

An abandoned Caribbean colony unearthed centuries after it had been forgotten and a case of mistaken identity in the archaeological record have conspired to rewrite the history of a barrier island off the Virginia and Maryland coasts.

These seemingly unrelated threads were woven together when Nicolas Delsol, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, set out to analyze ancient DNA recovered from cow bones found in archaeological sites. Delsol wanted to understand how cattle were domesticated in the Americas, and the genetic information preserved in centuries-old teeth held the answer. But they also held a surprise.

"It was a serendipitous finding," he said. "I was sequencing mitochondrial DNA from fossil cow teeth for my Ph.D. and realized something was very different with one of the specimens when I analyzed the sequences."

That's because the specimen in question, a fragment of an adult molar, wasn't a cow tooth at all but instead once belonged to a horse. According to a study published this Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, the DNA obtained from the tooth is also the oldest ever sequenced for a domesticated horse from the Americas. The tooth was excavated from one of Spain's first colonized settlements. Located on the island of Hispaniola, the town of Puerto Real was established in 1507 and served for decades as the last port of call for ships sailing from the Caribbean. But rampant piracy and the rise of illegal trade in the 16th century forced the Spanish to consolidate their power elsewhere on the island, and in 1578, residents were ordered to evacuate Puerto Real. The abandoned town was destroyed the following year by Spanish officials.

The remnants of the once-bustling port were inadvertently rediscovered by a medical missionary named William Hodges in 1975. Archaeological excavations of the site led by Florida Museum distinguished research curator Kathleen Deagan were carried out between 1979 and 1990.

Horse fossils and associated artifacts are incredibly rare at Puerto Real and similar sites from the time period, but cow remains are a common find. According to Delsol, this skewed ratio is primarily due to the way Spanish colonialists valued their livestock.

"Horses were reserved for individuals of high status, and owning one was a sign of prestige," he said. "There are full-page descriptions of horses in the documents that chronicle the arrival of [Hernán] Cortés in Mexico, demonstrating how important they were to the Spanish."

In contrast, cows were used as a source of meat and leather, and their bones were regularly discarded in communal waste piles called middens. But one community's trash is an archaeologist's treasure, as the refuse from middens often confers the clearest glimpse into what people ate and how they lived.

The specimen's biggest surprise wasn't revealed until Delsol compared its DNA with that of modern horses from around the world. Given that the Spanish brought their horses from the Iberian Peninsula in southern Europe, he expected horses still living in that region would be the closest living relatives of the 500-year-old Puerto Real specimen.

Instead, Delsol found its next of kin over 1,000 miles north of Hispaniola, on the island of Assateague off the coast of Maryland and Virginia. Feral horses have roamed freely across the long stretch of barrier island for hundreds of years, but exactly how they got there has remained a mystery.

According to the National Park Service, which manages the northern half of Assateague, the likeliest explanation is that the horses were brought over in the 1600s by English colonists from the mainland in an attempt to evade livestock taxes and fencing laws. Others believe the feral herds descended from horses that survived the shipwreck of a Spanish galleon and swam to shore, a theory popularized in the 1947 children's novel "Misty of Chincoteague." The book was later adapted to film, helping spread the shipwreck legend to an even wider audience.

Until now, there has been little evidence to support either theory. Proponents of the shipwreck theory claim it would be unlikely that English colonists would lose track of valuable livestock, while those in favor of an English origin of the herds point to the lack of sunken vessels nearby and the omission of feral horses in historical records of the region.

The results of the DNA analysis, however, unequivocally point to Spanish explorers as being the likeliest source of the horses on Assateague, Delsol explained.

"It's not widely reported in the historical literature, but the Spanish were exploring this area of the mid-Atlantic pretty early on in the 16th century. The early colonial literature is often patchy and not completely thorough. Just because they don't mention the horses doesn't mean they weren't there."

The feral herds on Assateague weren't the only horses to revert back to their wild heritage after arriving in the Americas. Colonists from all over Europe brought with them horses of various breeds and pedigrees, some of which bucked their bonds and escaped into the surrounding countryside.

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Horses and pigs sense harsh speaking tones

How we speak matters to animals. Horses, pigs and wild horses can distinguish between negative and positive sounds from their fellow species and near relatives, as well as from human speech. This, according to new research in behavioral biology at the University of Copenhagen. The study provides insight into the history of emotional development and opens up interesting perspectives with regards to animal welfare.

The idea of horse whisperers -- those with a talent for communicating with horses -- may bring a chuckle to many. But according to new research from the University of Copenhagen and ETH Zurich, there may be something about their whispering skills. In an international collaboration, along with researchers Anne-Laure Maigrot and Edna Hillmann, behavioral biologist Elodie Briefer of the University of Copenhagen's Department of Biology investigated whether a range of animals can distinguish between positively and negatively charged sounds.

"The results showed that domesticated pigs and horses, as well as Asian wild horses, can tell the difference, both when the sounds come from their own species and near relatives, as well as from human voices," explains Elodie Briefer. Pigs were studied along with boar, their wild relatives. Just as in the case of the two related horse species, the pigs clearly reacted to how the sounds of their counterparts were emotionally charged. In fact, to the same extent as when it came to sounds of their own kind.

The animals even showed the ability to distinguish between positively or negatively charged human voices. While their reactions were more subdued, all but wild boars reacted differently when exposed to human speech that was either charged with positive or negative emotion.

Human gibberish

The researchers played recordings of animal sounds and human voices from hidden speakers.

To avoid having the domesticated animals react to specific words, positive and negative human speech was performed by a professional voice actor in a kind of gibberish without any meaningful phrases.

The animals' behavioral reactions were recorded in a number of categories used in previous studies -- everything from their ear position to their movement or lack thereof.

On this basis, the researchers concluded that: How we speak matters to animals.

"Our results show that these animals are affected by the emotions we charge our voices with when we speak to or are around them. They react more strongly -- generally faster -- when they are met with a negatively charged voice, compared to having a positively charged voice played to them first. In certain situations, they even seem to mirror the emotion to which they are exposed" says Elodie Briefer.

Do animals have an emotional life?

Part of the aim of the study, was to investigate the possibility of "emotional contagion" in animals -- a kind of mirroring of emotion. Situations where one expressed emotion is assumed by another. In behavioral biology, this type of reaction is seen as the first step in the empathy category.

"Should future research projects clearly demonstrate that these animals mirror emotions, as this study suggests, it will be very interesting in relation to the history of the development of emotions and the extent to which animals have an emotional life and level of consciousness," says Elodie Briefer.

The study was unable to detect clear observations of "emotional contagion," but an interesting result was in the order by which the sounds where delivered. Sequences in which the negative sound was played first triggered stronger reactions in all but the wild boars. This included human speech.

According to Elodie Briefer, this suggests that the way we talk around animals and the way we talk to animals may have an impact on their well-being.

"It means that our voices have a direct impact on the emotional state of animals, which is very interesting from an animal welfare perspective," she says.

This knowledge doesn't just raise ethical questions about how we perceive animals -- and vice versa, it can also be used as a concrete means of improving animals' daily lives, if those who work with them are familiar with it.

"When the animals reacted strongly to hearing negatively charged speech first, the same is also true in the reverse. That is, if animals are initially spoken to in a more positive, friendly voice, when met by people, they should react less. They may become calmer and more relaxed," explains Elodie Briefer.

Next step for the Copenhagen University researcher is the switchover. She and her colleagues, are now looking into how well we humans are able to understand animal sounds of emotion.

How the researchers did it
 

• The animals in the experiment were either privately owned (horses), from a research station (pigs) or living in zoos in Switzerland and France (wild Przewalski's horses and wild boars).
• The researchers used animal sounds with a previously established emotion valence.
• The animal sounds and human voices were played to the animals from hidden speakers.
• Doing so required high sound quality to ensure for the natural frequencies heard best by animals.
• The sounds were played in sequences with either a positive or negatively charged sound first, then a pause, -- and then sounds with reverse valence, i.e. the reverse emotion.
• The reactions were recorded on video, which the researchers could subsequently use to observe and record the animals' reactions.
• Three theses can explain the animal reactions

The researchers worked with three theories about which conditions they expected to influence the animals' reactions in the experiment:

Phylogeny
 

• According to this theory, depending on the evolution of species, i.e., the history of evolution, animals with a common ancestry may be able to perceive and interpret each other's sounds by virtue of their common biology.

Domestication
 

• Close contact with humans, over a long period of time, may have increased the ability to interpret human emotions.
• Animals that are good at picking up human emotions might have been preferred for breeding.

Familiarity
 

• Based on learning. The specific animals in the study may have learned a greater understanding of humans and fellow species, who they were in close contact with where they were housed.

The conclusion is as follows. Among the horse species, the phylogeny thesis best explained their behavior. In contrast, the behavior of the pig species best fit the domestication hypothesis.

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Medieval warhorses were surprisingly small in stature

Medieval warhorses are often depicted as massive and powerful beasts, but in reality many were no more than pony-sized by modern standards, a new study shows.

Horses during the period were often below 14.2 hands high, but size was clearly not everything, as historical records indicate huge sums were spent on developing and maintaining networks for the breeding, training and keeping of horses used in combat.

A team of archaeologists and historians searching for the truth about the Great Horse have found they were not always bred for size, but for success in a wide range of different functions -- including tournaments and long-distance raiding campaigns.

Researchers analysed the largest dataset of English horse bones dating between AD 300 and 1650, found at 171 separate archaeological sites.

The study, published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, shows that breeding and training of warhorses was influenced by a combination of biological and cultural factors, as well as behavioural characteristics of the horses themselves such as temperament.

Depictions of medieval warhorses in films and popular media frequently portray massive mounts on the scale of Shire horses, some 17 to 18 hands high. However, the evidence suggests that horses of 16 and even 15 hands were very rare indeed, even at the height of the royal stud network during the 13th and 14th centuries, and that animals of this size would have been seen as very large by medieval people.

Researcher Helene Benkert, from the University of Exeter, said: "Neither size, nor limb bone robusticity alone, are enough to confidently identify warhorses in the archaeological record. Historic records don't give the specific criteria which defined a warhorse; it is much more likely that throughout the medieval period, at different times, different conformations of horses were desirable in response to changing battlefield tactics and cultural preferences."

The tallest Norman horse recorded was found at Trowbridge Castle, Wiltshire, estimated to be about 15hh, similar to the size of small modern light riding horses. The high medieval period (1200-1350 AD) sees the first emergence of horses of around 16hh, although it is not until the post-medieval period (1500-1650 AD) that the average height of horses becomes significantly larger, finally approaching the sizes of modern warmblood and draft horses.

Professor Alan Outram, from the University of Exeter, said: "High medieval destriers may have been relatively large for the time period, but were clearly still much smaller than we might expect for equivalent functions today. Selection and breeding practices in the Royal studs may have focused as much on temperament and the correct physical characteristics for warfare as they did on raw size."

Professor Oliver Creighton, the Principal Investigator for the project, commented: "The warhorse is central to our understanding of medieval English society and culture as both a symbol of status closely associated with the development of aristocratic identity and as a weapon of war famed for its mobility and shock value, changing the face of battle."

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