We do know that the encroaching forests presented many formidable obstacles in addition to acorns. The trees were difficult for the horses to navigate. Predators found many hiding places. Forage was limited. The horses’ main defense, speed, was no longer effective; the trees slowed them down.
In any case, forests generally do not support large mammals. The arrival of the mixed oak forests coincided with the extinction of the mammoths. Reindeer headed north, never to return. Horses retreated to a few areas where forests could not take root. Sometimes other animals pushed back the forests, helping the horses. In modern Africa, for example, elephants are de facto land managers who keep forests from spreading by eating young trees.
In Europe, of course, there were no elephants, and the mammoths were gone. But there was another de facto land manager—Homo sapiens. After the ice melted, Pleistocene people turned from living under rock overhangs to living in small open-air settlements and, in doing so, changed the landscape. By the time the Holocene epoch, our own epoch, began 11,700 years ago, Homo sapiens were skilled at using fire in many ways. They improved their hunting opportunities by burning the land to encourage the growth of young shoots, which in turn lured grazers. They cut trees around their settlements, opening small clearings. When they abandoned these settlements, the horses could come in to graze. No one knows whether any of these horses were domesticated, but since there’s no clear evidence that they were, scientists have left the question open. Unfortunately, that’s sometimes interpreted in discussions by the general public as meaning that they weren’t. Perhaps the best way to explain this is that science—which relies on evidence—has no clear finding on this matter.
In other places, forests just didn’t thrive. In Galicia’s extensive coastal heathlands, for example, the soil was too acidic, and the wind and salt spray stunted the growth of any trees that managed to put down roots. Here, another ecosystem would prevail—one that the remaining horses were able to adapt to.
* * *
One absolutely frigid June day, in the midst of the climate anomaly that encouraged the growth of too many New Forest acorns, Jason Ransom and I and several Galician scientists, including Laura Lagos, visited such a place, located in the extreme northwestern corner of Spain. I’d thought of Spain as a “southern” country with a hot and dry climate, but Galicia’s heathlands sit on a parallel with Nova Scotia.
In a four-wheel-drive vehicle we drove over muddy, deeply rutted roads up to the top of a three-thousand-foot-high coastal mountain. The wind, coming in off the North Atlantic, was blowing at gale force. We pushed open the doors of the vehicle, turned sideways to the wind, and made our way to the edge of an abyss.
Our guide, botanist Jaime Fagúndez, opened his arms to show us the valley below.
“This,” he declared, “is called a hyperoceanic system.”
The term “hyper” was appropriate. We looked out as far as the eye could see, which turned out not to be very far at all. There was too much fog, too much mist, too many rain clouds.
Ransom and I looked at each other.
“This,” we said, “is Spain in June?”
I wished I had my January-in-New-England coat with me. Were it not for the salt in the air coming in off the Atlantic, the rain that pelted us would certainly have been snow. Ransom, who’d had an entirely different impression of where we were going, had only sandals with socks. This area reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Sable Island—windy, wet, forlorn. I thought of an old British Victorian romance novel I’d once read: a distraught heroine runs frantically across the heath, only to be found the next day, dead from the cold.
There were Garranos here, but it was going to take an awful lot of dedication to see them. Despite the wind, these mountains were shrouded in thick, heavy mist. Fog made the valleys below us invisible.
This was not an unusual situation, Fagúndez assured us.
“The rain in Spain,” I said to Lagos, “does not stay mainly on the plain.”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
Then she said: “Up here on these heathlands, it’s like this pretty much year-round.”
I snorted. Even my dogs wouldn’t go out in weather like this—yet the Garranos we managed to see were downright jolly. My own horses typically stood dejectedly in this kind of downpour, with hanging heads and rumps to the wind, waiting for the nightmare to go away and for the sun to come out. If shelter were available, they sought it out.
I mentioned this to Felipe Bárcena, Lagos’s senior colleague, who spent several days traveling with us.
“Well,” he said, “they’re not horses. They’re Garranos.” Bárcena so strongly believes in this difference that he has proposed that they be declared a separate subspecies: Equus ferus atlanticus.
We had seen several other populations of Garranos much farther south, where the weather was kinder. Temperatures were warm. The days, sunny. Yet those animals had seemed rather sad. They had found ridgelines where the wind kept the insects at bay and stood with heads hanging. I was happy—nothing like the hot sun, from my point of view—but the horses looked like worn-out plow horses. They barely moved.
Our two species differ in our opinions as to what makes a great weather day, but before I began researching this book, I hadn’t thought about how our weather preferences had anything to do with evolution. It turns out that horses, having evolved for a considerable amount of time in northern regions, rather enjoy chilly temperatures. Many of us, on the other hand, with our two-hundred-thousand-year-old roots in Africa, prefer sun and warmth. We can survive in colder climates, but the necessary skills must be learned.
As Ransom and I huddled in our vehicle, trying to keep warm and dry, the Garranos living in this “hyperoceanic” world trotted around, seemingly invigorated. They wandered up and down the steep hillsides. They chomped with great satisfaction on the gorse. The stallions argued with each other. The colts and fillies played games. Their long, matted manes and tails dripped in rivulets, which traced small patterns in the mud in which they stood.
“Maybe,” I mused, “Garranos actually like miserable, rainy conditions.”
The thought made me sneeze.
Watching them, it occurred to me that the Sable Island horses, whom I’d always thought of as victimized by the whims of the North Atlantic Ocean, might find their island home pleasant. This just goes to show how flexible horses have become over the course of their 56-million-year evolutionary journey.
Ransom and I talked again about his theory that horses today occupy an anthropogenic niche. Still, while these Garranos may have enjoyed the nasty weather, they had plenty of other problems. Living in these heathlands is an equally hardy, healthy population of Iberian wolves who have also stuck it out over millennia. We rounded a corner and found completely cleaned skeletons of a mare and foal. A tiny, perfectly formed little hoof and lower leg, still covered in hide, lay in the mud. We wondered if the wolves had followed the mare, waiting for those few vulnerable moments when she had to lie down to give birth.
In much of the rest of Europe wolves are either extinct or limited in numbers,* but here in the rugged Galician highlands they prowl at will. They take an inordinately high number of Garrano foals. On our travels Lagos pointed out plenty of scars on the hindquarters of the babies, making it clear that the wolves aren’t always successful. We didn’t see any actual wolves—they’re too smart for that—but we saw plenty of wolf tracks and many piles of wolf scat.
Galicians used to control the wolf numbers by using wolf traps and organizing wolf hunts. The earliest known written record of a wolf hunt dates back about a thousand years, but the custom itself is probably much, much older. Lagos showed us several wolf traps—pairs of high walls built of stone. Each wall typically was almost a kilometer long. They are angled to each other in the shape of a very wide V. At the bottom of this funnel is a deep pit. During community wolf drives—before the invention of firearms—whole villages used to assemble and drive the wolves out of the
ir dens by making noise. Fleeing from the harassment, the wolves ran along the stone walls, unaware they were running into a trap until the walls narrowed in and it was too late to escape. Along the run, other people jumped up from hiding places and made more noise, harrying the wolves and driving them forward. While one person would hesitate to behave this way with a pack of wolves, the villagers found safety in numbers. Apparently, they were able to herd the wolves without too much risk of bodily harm. The desperate wolves, driven by the group of people, ran forward into the V and fell into a pit, where people killed them. The Galicians preserve the walls as a cultural memory.
Contending with wolves is challenging for the horses, but I suspect that gorse, in its own way, is equally contentious for most grazing animals. It’s a rather useless plant. It does grow leaves, but almost as soon as the leaves appear, they transmogrify into those ultrasharp thorns. Even worse: land taken over by gorse is land that is difficult to rehabilitate. The more you burn gorse, the better it grows.
On the other hand, gorse may be one reason why Atlantic coastal ponies survived: by learning to eat this marginal food, horses could live on marginal land. It may well have been an early example of horses opting for Ransom’s anthropogenic niche: by eating gorse, Garranos could live in an area rejected by humans.
Small, stocky ponies, often well under five feet tall at the withers, with large heads and sagging bellies, these odd little animals are likely one of the main foundation lines of our modern horse breeds, particularly of solid-boned breeds like huge draft horses and tall, sturdy Irish hunters. Yet the Garranos are not wimps, despite their small size. They and their Atlantic coastal kin, genetic tests suggest, provided the sturdiness of leg necessary for the heavier work humans would eventually ask horses to perform, like carrying knights with armor in the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, they are despised. Poor things. They’re kind of like the Rodney Dangerfields of the horse world. Local folk differentiate between Garranos, whom they also call bestas—beasts—and other horses, whom they call caballos. All honor goes to the caballos; the bestas do the slave labor, like donkeys.
Galicians have tried to “improve” the Garrano through breeding, but to no avail. Lagos told me about one such effort, when villagers bought a well-bred stallion of another breed, a “better” stallion, and put him out with some Garrano mares.
The first year this “better” stallion was with the Garrano mares, she told me, “he was very strong and there were many foals.” But during the following winter, the stallion nearly starved to death.
A mustachioed Garrano mare gets a haircut. (Greg Auger)
“All he did was eat, eat, eat, all winter long,” Lagos explained.
The following spring he was too weak to breed and had to be removed.
“Not only that—all the foals from that stallion also died,” Lagos added.
I thought for a while about the meaning of the word “better.” “Better” according to whom? Perhaps this comes under the categories of Mother Nature Knows Best and Let Well Enough Alone. If Galician scientists are correct and these ponies descend from the stock that survived the melting of the ice, then they evolved over millennia to fit into this unique coastal system. Horses brought in from elsewhere may simply lack the necessary biological “equipment”—like mustaches, perhaps—to survive on gorse and live in a wet, nasty, windy climate.
* * *
We know that following the environmental chaos that ended the Pleistocene, horses in the Western Hemisphere disappeared, and in Europe and Asia only a few distinct types lived on into the Holocene. Some type of thick-legged Spanish horse, like the Garrano or the Pottok, provided some foundation stock. A finer-boned horse type, ancestor to today’s Arabians and Thoroughbreds, survived in the interior southerly deserts of Asia. There may have been another horse type that survived in Mongolia, and a few other small pockets of ponies, like Siberia’s Yakut horses.
But in most locations, horses were either absent or nearly so. Scientists know this because archaeological sites from around ten thousand or so years ago are relatively common across Asia and Europe. In those sites, there are many bones of prey animals, but the bones of horses are found only very rarely, in contrast to the plentiful bones found at Pleistocene sites. In Greece, where bones of Hipparion are easily found, archaeologists have cataloged many early-Holocene bones of pigs—but not of horses, implying that horse populations had plummeted.
And yet, today horses live on all continents except Antarctica. Tens of millions of horses, the vast majority of them living in partnership with humans, inhabit the Australian outback, the plains of North America and Mongolia, the hills and pastures of modern Europe. Despite their susceptibility to insect-borne African diseases, they are now even common on that continent, because humans have learned how to inoculate the horses against illnesses such as sleeping sickness, carried by the tsetse fly.
We have gone out of our way to nurture horses, even ensuring that they can with our help live in areas where they could not survive on their own. We seem to just want them around, even though they are no longer necessary. We don’t have to use them for transportation or farming, and yet they are still present on farms and ranches, and they still pull carriages, even if just for tourists. In Amsterdam, I saw a team of draft horses pull a wagon full of beer on a daily basis down one of the city’s main streets. Every day, the traffic slowed to make room for the team. When the horses passed, people stood stock-still, entranced by their size and power. In Merrimack, New Hampshire, two-thousand-pound white-faced Clydesdale horses (with their feathery feet, reminiscent of the little Garranos) are kept for public relations reasons by a beer company.
Occurring in only ten thousand years, this is a phenomenal range expansion. It happened, geologically speaking, in an impressively short period of time. For this success, horses can thank humans, who have cared for, and even fussed over, equines in many different ways. I wonder if this is one way in which humans are truly different from other animals: We reach out to other species. And we respond strongly to animals who respond to us. As long as the animal isn’t dangerous, we may even stand quietly, just watching, hoping that the wild thing we are spying on will come over to say hello. And it turns out that horses will sometimes do just that.
The closer they have allowed us to come, the stronger our partnership with them. We have bred them in large numbers, encouraging their proliferation, and we have transported them in ships from the Old World to the New, returning them to the continent on which they evolved. We have pampered them by feeding them rich grain, by ensuring their access to water, by driving away predators like wolves, and by sheltering them from the wind, rain, and snow. We have brushed their coats, looked after their hoofs, and even provided dental care when necessary.
If we have made ourselves useful to the horse, this is because the horse has made himself amenable to us. Sensitive, responsive, cooperative (mostly), comfortable to ride, and able to forage with limited human help, horses, as soon as they were domesticated, became the foundation on which human civilization was built. Researchers who study the earliest days of farming and animal domestication often compare the domestication of horses with the domestication of cattle and sheep, but there’s more to the human affinity for horses than mere productivity. Horses, like dogs, are our companions. Because horses can form strong bonds, they may stay loyal to specific humans throughout the whole of their lives. And we may stay loyal to them: I often dream about horses I’ve spent time with many years ago.
Pleistocene art implies to me that this kind of mutuality may have existed for tens of thousands of years, but once we learned to keep horses in paddocks and learned to ride, the relationship became formalized. It’s no exaggeration to say that the invention of riding was to early civilization what the invention of computers has been to us: a genuine, world-shaking Revolution with a capital R. Until riding began, travel by boat was the only convenient form of long-distance travel. We were, essentially, prisoners of th
e waterways.
But once people learned to ride, a new kind of ocean—an ocean of grassland—could be navigated, with only a little physical effort on our part. Horses offered people, for the first time, the experience of freedom. The interiors of Asia, North America, and South America were no longer barriers but beacons. Undulations of grass, daunting to a human on foot, become tantalizing temptations when we are mounted: Come hither, the grass whispers. See what’s over this next rise.
* * *
When I read about the deaths of the New Forest ponies, and about the ancient custom of humans protecting them from eating too many acorns, I began wondering about the origins of this protective behavior and, indeed, of riding itself. Which step came first? When and how did riding begin? The conventional scientific view suggests that riding, along with the domestication of the horse, first occurred in central Asia. (It’s important to separate the two phenomena. Riding is one event, archaeologically speaking, and horse domestication a different event. It’s quite possible, for example, that people began riding horses long before they domesticated them.) We don’t have an earliest date for riding, but we do have an earliest known date for domestication. Researchers investigating an archaeological site called Botai in Kazakhstan found what appear to be small “corrals” in which mares were milked. Bits of broken pottery recovered from these enclosures have revealed animal fats unique to horse milk, confirming the theory that mares were domesticated at this site. The site dates from about 5,500 years ago and is widely known as the first definitive evidence of people keeping horses. However, there is no evidence at Botai of riding.
Absence of evidence, though, is not evidence of absence. Horses could have been ridden or kept for milk long before Botai existed, but no one has found any definitive proof of this. Given that cattle and sheep were domesticated at least ten thousand years ago, and given that horses are better able than cattle to survive on cold northern plains (just like Whisper, they can use their hoofs to break through ice to drink or to scrape away snow to find grass; cattle cannot), it makes sense that horses would have been domesticated long before Botai.
The Horse Page 19
