First to Ride

Sandra Olsen stands knee-deep in summer grass on a sprawling plain in northern Kazakhstan, peering at horse herders creeping antlike over a golden hill miles away. Kazakhs have roamed this cold dry grassland on horseback for centuries and are renowned for their ability to shoot arrows with accuracy while bouncing atop galloping steeds. As Olsen watches mammoth clouds gathering on the horizon, she envisions a time thousands of years ago when these plains were inhabited by hardy hunter-gatherers who lived on horse meat but did not know how to ride the horses they hunted. She muses on how radically their world must have changed when one of them finally climbed aboard a horse, tamed it, and rode like the wind. "Prior to horseback riding, most people carried all their cargoon their shoulders, or they were restricted to using boats along rivers and coastlines," says Olsen, an archaeologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "Horses were swift of foot, could easily support one or two human passengers, carry heavy loads, and survive on very poor quality vegetation or fodder. They were our first form of rapid transit."