History of Horses and Horse Riding

Thanks to the evolution of modern technology, our messages can travel close to the speed of light, i.e nearly 186,000 miles per second. In consideration of how messages were delivered in times past, the carrier of such a message would have to travel on foot, and even if he was a good walker/runner, he could only cover a short distance in a long time. The fastest marathoners (whose event is named for the legend of the messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC to announce a Greek military victory over the Persians) cover 26 miles (or 42 kilometers) in just over two hours. Despite such effort, even the fastest human runner would be totally exhausted.The domestication of the horse signaled a major innovaƭon in transport and communication. It ushered in a new era where humans could travel farther than they used to and carry much more weight with them. People who could ride on horses also carried messages, increasing collective learning as information changed hands. There was a significant increase in the rate at which humans could travel in relation to that of a horse’s walk, trot, or gallop, at a range of about 6 kilometers per hour to about 89 kilometers per hour (the record gallop speed over short distances).

What made horses so fast? What was the relationship between the speed of horses and humans’ energy boost? What informed the choices of humans to choose the horse as a method of transport?

To answer these quesƭons, we must first look back to how the horse evolved.The history of the horse dates as far back as 50 million years, to a small animal named Hyracotherium which lived in North America. Fossils of Eohippus, as the first horses were known, showed the mammal to be an herbivore smaller than a dog. Migration of horses back to North America did not take place up until the fifteenth century A.D. But we also do know that the first horses had toes, not hooves, and looked nothing like the horses of today.

They were much smaller and ate leaves. The effect of changes in vegetations from swamplands to dry savannahs caused the horse to evolve from a creature with multiple toes to one with a single toe, which later became a hoof and which is better adapted to roaming dry land. Pliocene epoch created Pliohippus, the first single-toed horse.

The horse, Pliohippus( as it was known) served as a prototype for our own Equus, the modern horse. He possessed a hoof with sprung ligaments and longer legs with flexing ligaments, which gave way to a running action similar to that of the modern horse.

How Did Horse Riding Start?

Horse riding history and its timeline usually dates as far back to central Asia about five centuries or so before the appearance of cavalry in armies of the Middle East around 1000 B.C. However, new pieces of evidence suggested ( based on dental wear caused by a bit in a prehistoric horse ) that riding began much earlier.

Prehistoric people began to tame horses in the Copper Age 6000 years ago. When horses were fully domesticated for the first time, it signaled a major innovation in transportation and communication. Before 4000 B.C. horses were wild and lived through the vast plains of grasslands in Eastern Europe and Asia. Fossils of horses recovered from prehistoric sites in Europe suggests that they might have been used as wild game, as domesticated sources of meat and as mounts. Despite these new discoveries, the horses were too small to actually carry people.Eventually, they were bred to larger sizes but it took a lot of time. At some point, humans began to see horses as more than just a source of food. It is most likely that humans used horses to pull a plow and later to pull the wheeled vehicles, such as chariots before humans learned to ride them. Although it is fair to say that farmers didn’t usually use horses for plowing in the ancient times because they usually used oxen instead, or simply turned over the soil by hand; horses were too expensive to acquire.