All right welcome back and in this lecture we're gonna kinda explore how horses have made such an impact on us and, and in this slide it's one of my favorite cave drawings, you know obviously cause I've such a passion for horses and this is from the Chauvet Cave in France, and if you've never seen it you can go online and they have a really neat section on all of the cave art work that they found and dates back thousands and thousands of years. So, you know, horses obviously have played a huge role in my promo video and I'll say it again and again and again, horses are mans true best friend. I love dogs. Dogs are awesome, there's nothing like a dog wet kiss, right? But, horses have been with us every step of the way as we have evolved and explored this planet. And as we have grown, horses have been critical in each stage, each major stage of our development in the last few thousand years. Now early on, horses were hunted for food. So it was just another animal that early man was hunting these animals. And it's important to remember that horse meat is still eaten in many parts of the world today, so in Mexico, Japan, Europe, other countries it is part of their diet and we have to respect that, even though here in the United States we don't eat horses. Now this picture you may say, why is this important? And I just kinda threw it up there to show you science and the cool thing about science, but also, how we've able through DNA evidence, been able to trace the migratory route of humans. And you can see we all go back to common ancestors in Eastern Africa. And men and women have migrated into Europe, migrated across Asia, came down into the Americas to where the South American Indians are actually the most divergent through genetics from our most common ancestor. And I put this up here because this is how we're really unlocking a lot of mysteries in a lot of species through DNA evidence. And people are actually looking at this now currently in horses to kinda figure out where these horses were domesticated, because nobody really knows. We don't have firm, firm evidence. But, maybe through some DNA testing, we can start developing a more clear picture of where this happened. So I'm just going to cover three main areas where people think horses might have first been domesticated over 6000 years ago. And the first one is in modern day Ukraine. There is some evidence that possibly horses were first roped and somebody jumped on the back of them and thought wow, this is fun or this is really great. Let's do this some more. So that's one area that people think might be and there's some evidence that it might've been in China or Mongolia around the same time period. Possibly this is where horses were and then, this paper from Levine, that came out in the Equine Vet Journal, he proposes the best evidence is actually Northern Kazakhstan. Looking at some of the old bones of the horses that they found, looking at the male female ratios. He was saying in his article that it was a one to one ratio, where. In some of these other pastoral societies when they were hunting horses, you would find mainly younger horses or more females and less males because that's how horses naturally are. One male to a few females. And their band. So it's an interesting paper and really some compelling evidence that this is where horses were first domesticated. But the take home message is it was somewhere in this Eurasia area on the plains of Asia and Eastern Europe where horses were first thought to be domesticated. Now, why should we domesticate these animals? And the obvious answer is, it's fun, but you could jump on the back of them. You can go a lot faster than we can run. You can go further. And, early on, this probably gave these early hunters a huge advantage, being able to run down prey and get them. And then here's an early another cave drawing. Over 5,000 years ago, showing a man on the back of a horse. And then as we get more developed, there's more evidence of horses being used in different ways, pulling chariots, starting to see them in agriculture. They were still being raised in many parts of the world as meat. But also beast of burden, pulling carts, pulling chariots, stuff like that. And they really make a huge impact during the Bronze Age, so we're look at 3000 to 1000 BCE and again, talking about traveling distances, better agriculture. But also, increasing trade, all of this resulting in better nutrition, more advanced society, larger families. So, again, horses are allowing us to have more people thus advance a lot quicker. So what other species on earth has done that? And there isn't. Horses are it. They're the most Important in our own development, and then again to see how early man felt about these animals. We find it all in their artwork. This is White Horse Hill in England, the White Horse of Uffington, and you can see that is clearly a picture and it's this chalk outline of a horse. Now, just a couple other interesting tidbits. The first evidence of use of saddles was the Assyrian Calvary, here you can see in this picture showing that, a soft pad or blanket type. Doesn't have stirrups so, you know, incredible horsemen back then, and women, that they could ride these animals, almost bareback. Now they started using blankets, soft pads then the wooden saddle started to be developed the frame saddle that we see today and then first evidence of stirrups actually dates to India and it actually goes to these looped rope stirrups that they would put their toes in. So that's you know those were the early stirrups and then the metal stirrups started developing later in I think China and then parts of Europe really started to to flourish with the stirrups. Now the horse for thousands of years was critical to our own development our daily lives. Everybody pretty much had some sort of equid whether it was a donkey or a horse, or a mule, or some other hybrid. And you use that to transport, get around go to the neighbors house. Do the things that you did on your daily life. That all changed in the 20th century. Really the automobile was the major thing that changed it. And I use the United States as a microcosm of what was probably going on globally too, and the horse population was about 26 million, in 1915. And then after World War I with the cavalry being really ineffective and automobiles, making more and more of a presence known horses really started to, in popularity, decline to where in the 1960, you know, by 1960 there was maybe 3 million left in the United States. So, huge, huge decrease. Now we know, after 1960, we start to see this horse population increase in the United States to where we have over 10 million today. And I like to say, people rediscovered the horse. They found these animals. Fell back in love with them. Yeah we have a car, yeah we have a motorcycle, or a bicycle, or whatever. But it's not the same as riding a horse. There's just something about it, being outdoors, riding the back of an animal and that's what a lot of people have rediscovered and so we've seen this in the United States really take off and in other parts of the world. I mean, South America huge hot bed of horse activity in Asia and Europe. You know, we are not alone here in the United States. A lot of people have rediscovered their passions for these animals. And so we're really seeing them pickup the pace. So in our next lecture we're gonna kind of jump in and talk about different breeds throughout the world. There's over 140 breeds of horses and then we'll jump into breeds of donkeys and what not. But we're not gonna be able to cover all of them, so we're gonna take some snapshots here and there and kind of cover some of the big breeds in the world and go from there.
