Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

landscapes with people
Sufficient will have been said to show that in ecozones like the steppe region even
comparatively slight or short-lived climate events can have major effects on the lifestyles
of pastoral societies leading to changes in social systems and encouraging people
to move, usually westwards, to seek lusher pastures. Climate change, however, is
only one of many factors that, interacting together, create history.
The Horse
Steppe societies have always been dependent on the horse, whose natural habitat
was the open grassland. In the Early Holocene, following the Last Glaciation, various
species of equine roamed the steppe. The more numerous and most powerful
was Equus caballus, the ancestor of modern domesticated horses, short with stout legs,
dun-coloured, and with a stiff upstanding mane. Its closest modern relative is the
Przewalski’s horse, a wild horse taken into protective captivity in the nineteenth century
and now running free again in the nature reserves of Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
Other species were Equus hydruntinus, a smaller beast once living in the Pontic–Caspian
steppe which became extinct in the fourth millennium bc and Equus hernionas,
the Onager, an ass-like equid native of the semi-arid land around the north and east
side of the Caspian Sea.
As herbivores wild horses thrive on the steppe. They grow thick coats in the winter
as protection from the severe cold and are able to kick their way through the snow
cover to get to the grass beneath—a skill which sheep and cattle have failed to master—giving
the horse the capability of surviving on the open steppe without human
intervention. In the wild the natural social unit is the harem herd composed of a single
stallion and his entourage of mares. They are accompanied by their foals and fillies
until such time that the foals approach maturity, when they are driven off by the
stallion. One of the mares emerges as the leader of the herd while the stallion is its
protector. The young males driven from the harem herds join up to form bachelor
bands until they can challenge and oust old stallions or lure away mares to join them.
Hunters and gatherers attempting to exist on the steppe would soon have learned
the behaviour of wild horses sufficient to track them and arrange ambushes in the
wooded river valleys where they came to drink. In this way the small E. hernionas and
E. hydruntinus were soon hunted to extinction, leaving only the larger and faster E.
caballus to be the main meat provider. In some of the late Mesolithic hunting groups
in the Dniester region more than 50 per cent of the animal bones were of horse, and
food refuse at some sites in the Caspian Depression was composed almost exclusively
of equid remains. Without the wild horse a hunter-gatherer existence on the
more open steppe, where other animals were scarce, would have been impossible.
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