William T. Taylor / University of California Press / 360 pages
Even an ardent equine enthusiast will likely come away with a new appreciation for the horse after reading Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History. Ambitious in scope, the book examines humanity’s close relationship with horses across the globe since the dawn of civilization. Author William T. Taylor, assistant professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado Boulder, conducts a rigorous analysis of archaeological data to illustrate how a number of ancient cultures used horses to their advantage. Striking images of archaeological excavations and sites—an enormous ancient horse-and-chariot burial pit in China and hoof petroglyphs in Mongolia, for example—help illustrate horses’ outsized impact on our collective psyche.
The result is a sweeping account of how “in barely four millennia, horses had gone from a dwindling Ice Age mammal facing down extinction to a thriving domesticate flourishing alongside humans on nearly every large landmass on earth” and in a range of environments—from frigid northern climates to harsh, arid deserts. Their return and spread across the Great Plains of the “New World” from which they originated is itself a remarkable account of adaptation.
Hoof Beats also outlines the various reasons why other members of the Equidae family did not prove as well-suited for domestication. As Taylor notes, an “ornery zebra named Dan given to President Theodore Roosevelt … kickstarted an ill-fated government breeding program seeking to produce a zebra with a manageable temperament.”
The human-horse story is undoubtedly complex and certainly far from a purely benign or symbiotic relationship. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in some of the spiritual elements depicted; a recurring theme involves burials in which horses were sacrificed and placed alongside an array of goods with the dead. Taylor carefully traces advances in equipment and tack (saddles, stirrups, bits, reins, girth, etc.) that facilitated our reliance on horses—again, not always in a benign manner for the horse, as when pathological bone formations resulted from equipment used to exert control over the animal.
We typically think of mechanization and industrialization as spelling the end of our reliance on literal horsepower, yet the admittedly dramatic change was hardly as straightforward or abrupt as flipping a switch. Taylor reminds us of all the ways in which horses propelled this transition (e.g., “horseboat” ferries with paddlewheels powered by equines, and the heavy burden placed on horses in mining operations and other extractive industries).
Hoof Beats’ melding of archeology, paleontology, anthropology, genetics, and history—including, importantly, indigenous perspectives—ultimately provides more than an assessment of Equus caballus and its place in history; it underscores the extent to which our modern world simply would not exist as we know it without the lasting bond between human and horse.