Rosycheeks
I always wonder whos idea was it to put someone on a horse in the first place. I know forever horses and donkeys have always had heavy loads and I often think do these Animals mind or are they just trained to do it. Is it a natural thing is it what these animals were meant for in the first place. I always wonder this when I see a film with horse riding in like a cowboy film.
Read Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man or get hold of the 1970s TV series where he explains the 5000 year old history of man and horse. Some extracts and commentary:
The horse and the rider have many anatomical features in common. But it is the human creature that rides the horse, and not the other way about. And the rider is a very good example, because man was not created to ride the horse. There is no wiring inside the brain that makes us horse riders. Riding a horse is a comparatively recent invention, less than five thousand years old. And yet it has had an immense influence, for instance on our social structure. The plasticity of human behaviour makes that possible.
Filming the last remnants of an ancient horse-based culture in Afghanistan, Bronowski did not regret its decline. On the contrary, instead of applying the customary condescending doublethink towards primitive cultures, Bronowski traced the 5,000-year history from the earliest gangs of horsemen who stole from farmers what they could not produce themselves, to Genghis Khan, the terror of medieval civilization, and does not hesitate to classify that entire strand of cultural history along with Stalinism and Nazism as an archetypal enemy of the ascent of man. And the Nazi tank as the descendant of the war horse. “War,” says Bronowski, “is not a human instinct” (this was a sideswipe at Lorenz and all who wish to see the animal mind inside the human), “it is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft.”
We cannot hope to recapture today the terror that the mounted horse struck into the Middle East and Eastern Europe when it first appeared. That is because there is a difference of scale which I can only compare with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939, sweeping all before them. I believe that the importance of the horse in European history has always been underrated. In a sense, warfare was created by the horse, as a nomad activity. That is what the Huns brought, that is what the Phrygians brought, that is what finally the Mongols brought, and brought to a climax under Genghis Khan much later. In particular, the mobile hordes transformed the organisation of battle. They conceived a different strategy of war – a strategy that is like a war game; how, warmakers love to play games!
I think this is the episode where he discusses man using horses to steal food from one another:
The Harvest of the Seasons
Dr Jacob Bronowski's classic account of the social and intellectual evolution of the human race looks at the move mankind made from nomadic pasturage to settled agriculture, with the domestication of the horse and the cultivation of wheat.
www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ztord