A stable companion

I remember clearly the last match I played. It was decades ago, but the feel of it is still in my body, in my arms and my torso and in my legs. The rhythm of my mare’s galloping returns to me as though it were yesterday. Muscular memory is a joyous experience.

Following the line of the ball, she and I were halfway down the field. We had a clear shot into an undefended goal. Then, out of the blue, a horse and rider from the opposing team tore in front of us, 10 yards ahead at a 90-degree angle.

Still, my mare and I stayed in sync. She continued steady on while I shifted in the saddle to make the shot. Each of us knew exactly what the other was going to do. Our timing was perfect. We made the ball run straight and true, right under the belly of the horse crossing the line and straight on – into the goal.

I have to say, in all modesty, it was a great shot. I can say this in modesty because it may well have been the only great shot I ever made during my five years of playing polo.

That shot was one of life’s little miracles. Another was the partnership between me and my horse. She was an immensely handy little thing, a perfect partner who read every shift of body weight I made, every movement of the other horses and riders. Like other good polo ponies, she often anticipated the play before I did, read the tiniest clues from my legs, and was always right there, taking the challenge on by the time I had made a conscious decision. Nevertheless, her common sense was simply profound.

I was thinking of her when I decided to write a scientific book about the partnership between horses and humans. The result – The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion – is an attempt to say thank you to her, and to the many horses I’ve owned or ridden in my life, who have shown me places in the world I wouldn’t otherwise have seen and who have left me with memories, at the age of 65, that I otherwise wouldn’t have. I am eternally grateful to them.

In the days when I played polo, before I became serious about my career as an author, I took for granted that horses are willing to partner up with us. Later, I began to wonder: what is the nature of the partnership between horse and human and why do they choose to cooperate with us, and we with them? Why are we drawn to them? It’s not only that we can ride them – ie, get something from them – because the evidence points to a deeper allure: horses are the most commonly depicted animals in Ice Age art – art that was created roughly 35,000 to 10,000 years ago, long before evidence shows horses were either domesticated or ridden.

There are many different ways to answer the questions I had, but since I’m a science journalist, I decided to ask scientists who work in various horse-related fields. I interviewed

Oposite Mustangs in Wyoming’s Pryor Mountains This page, from top It was here where the earliest-known horses and true primates lived; a fossilised skeleton of a tiny dawn horse

neuroscientists, palaeontologists, cognitive researchers, archaeologists, art historians, experts in plate tectonics, researchers who knew a lot about the evolution of grass... the list goes on. I then read books by Nobel Laureates, novelists, philosophers, biologists, geologists and more.

What I found was that our attraction is strongly rooted in our mutually shared evolutionary journeys. The story is remarkable in that the relationship is deeper than anything I’d expected. For example, apparently we started life together. The earliest-known horses and the earliest-known true primates turn up together at Polecat Bench in the western American state of Wyoming. Same place. Same time. Same ecosystem.

Today, Polecat Bench is a desiccated, almost dismal habitat where the wind blows so hard that local folk say you can just lie back in its supportive arms and take a nap. But it wasn’t always so. Fifty-six million years ago, when the dawn horses and the earliest-known true primates occupied the area, Wyoming was wet, wild and warm. It was lush. It had shrubs, trees and wetlands.

Grass was next to non-existent. In fact, grasslands as such did not yet exist anywhere on our planet. But neither the horses nor the primates minded its absence. They had plenty to eat in the form of leaves and fruit. The little dawn horses had four toes on their front feet and three on their hind, and teeth that were good at sheering tender buds from branches. They had no grinding teeth, so, had there been any grass, they wouldn’t have been able to eat it anyway.

If you looked at a fossil of a dawn horse, unless you had an educated eye, you might not recognise the animal we treasure today. The peculiar backbone of the modern horse did not yet exist, so these dog-sized horses would not have been able to gallop. Scientists believe this animal could only ‘scamper’, but that gait was enough to allow it to evade most of the predators then extant on the planet. In fact, some scientists suggest that the little horses’ scamper was then the fastest gait going.

Nothing stays the same on our planet, and the centre of the North American continent – where horse evolution primarily occurred – underwent profound changes over the following tens of millions of years. Mountains rose. Mountains eroded. The continent became cooler, and then heated up again. During some periods, North America was physically connected to Asia, which allowed various species of horse to migrate into Asia, Europe and even Africa.

Throughout all these tectonic shifts and climatic changes, horses survived by adapting. When the world changed, after becoming substantially colder, the horses lost toes. Eventually, with only one toe – the modern hoof – the horses were able to navigate the open grasslands that finally covered the planet during the ice ages, when the trees receded.

We primates chose a different survival technique. Rather than making such massive physical changes, we moved south. Primates

disappeared entirely from North America when conditions became colder and instead proliferated in the nurturing warmth of Africa.

For quite a while, horses and primates went their separate ways. But from time to time, different species of horse found their way into eastern and southern Africa. The three species of modern zebra are one result, but among the most successful of the pre-modern horse species that made it to Africa was a group called Hipparion. These horses, who lived only a few million years ago, are easily recognised as animals closely related to our Equus. They were small, weighing perhaps from 100 to 250lbs. They still had three very functional toes at the bottom of each leg. But they had a distinctively horse-like head, and teeth that allowed them to live primarily on grass.

Indeed, my favourite example of the horse-human partnership dates back to the existence of these hipparion horses. A few decades ago, scientists researching human evolution were working in an area of southeast Africa called Laetoli. They found footprints of a pre-human called Australopithecus afarensis. Dating from about 3.6 million years ago, these footprints showed a trail left in volcanic ash by three individuals – possibly two adults and one youngster. The tracks showed, remarkably, an arch in the foot, just as we modern humans have.

The Laetoli tracks were an international sensation. Their discovery was written about in the popular press and discussed on television news broadcasts worldwide.

But what wasn’t widely discussed was the presence of two sets of horse tracks – a Hipparion mare and foal – that crossed the tracks left by the pre-humans. In those tracks you can see the foal gambolling back and forth in front of the mare, just as we often see today, and you can see the mare slip in the ash at one point and use her side-toes to brace herself and keep from falling.

There we were together, on the same African plain at about the same time, sharing a habitat. Truly remarkable.

I also love thinking about the evidence of our relationship with horses that comes down to us from the art of Ice Age Europe and Asia, from about 35,000 years ago to around 12,000 years ago. By this time, horses were pretty much what they are today: single-toed beings with a propensity for running and living together in small bands.

And we were pretty much what we are today too: Homo sapiens. We used stone tools. We ate horsemeat. We lived underneath rock overhangs in what would become the Middle East, Spain, France, Britain, Germany and so on.

And everywhere we lived, we made art. We painted on cave walls, carved talismans from mammoth ivory, made spear-throwers

out of reindeer antler. In this art, many, many animals were depicted, but, by some scientific accounts, horses were most commonly shown. I’ve seen horse heads carved on to the shoulder bones of horses, horse heads carved into reindeer antlers, ivory jewellery that depicts horses and scene after scene after scene of horses painted on cave walls.

It’s clear from these portrayals that humans revered horses long before we kept them as livestock or rode them in any organised fashion. It’s also clear we spent long hours just watching their behaviour. These Ice Age artists depicted much of the subtlety of what we’d recognise as modern equine behaviour – you might as well be looking at your own horses, pastured in a group out in a large field.

In southern France’s famous Chauvet Cave, for example, we can see a band of four horses standing together, eating and watching the actions of the other animals around them, just as they would in the modern world. In Lascaux Cave, meanwhile, we can see a line of jogging ponies travelling along the wall. Further south, in the Pyrenees, carvings made from reindeer antler show a horse with laid-back ears and bared teeth.

Near a cave mouth in Germany, excavators have found a tiny yet majestic carving of a horse with an arched neck – a stallion, perhaps, challenging a rival? – that was apparently meant to be worn as a pendant. At around 35,000 years of age, it is not only the oldest known piece of equine art, but among the oldest-known artistic depictions of anything.

Polished and graceful and handled by many humans, it is the most elegant statement I can imagine regarding the continuing evolution of the 56-million-year-old partnership between horses and humans.

American science journalist Wendy Williams is the author of The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion, published in October 2015 by Scientific American and Farrar Straus Giroux and named one of the year’s 10 best non-fiction books by The Wall Street Journal

Opposite A depiction of the wild horses of two million years ago

bottom Rock paintings on the walls of Chauvet Cave in southern France and Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne respectively Below The author’s critically acclaimed book