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Comment by chroma

12 days ago

Agriculture is almost certainly a prerequisite to domesticating horses (as they must be selectively bred in captivity), so hunter-gatherer tribes like the Clovis never had a chance to do so.

A nomadic horse based society like the Magyars can def selectively breed horses

  • Horses were domesticated long before the Magyars showed up. It’s much easier to selectively breed horses if you start with domesticated ones.

Pickets and hobbles are things; they don't require settlements.

EDIT: I'm an idiot, there are two even simpler things:

Shish kebab is a thing; it doesn't require settlements. When it comes time to sacrifice, are you more likely to eat the individual who's easy too get along with, or the ornery one?

Rocky Mountain Oysters are things; they don't require settlements. Hence the tripartite nature of Indo-European gender: Bull/Cow/Ox, Stallion/Mare/Gelding, Ram/Ewe/Wether, etc.

Is it? There were plenty of nomadic tribes dealing with various livestock, horses included, without agriculture.

  • They got those domesticated breeds from agricultural societies. The only example of an animal domesticated by hunter-gatherers is the dog.

    • Sorry, I don't think you can say nomads or semi-nomad got any of their five snout from agricultural societies, there is no proof of that.

      Especially since most of those agricultural society got their law and political organizations from nomads (Turkish 'torük', ancestral law, while influenced by Islam, is definitely from Gotürks' 'türük' which was at the time likely already thousand of years old). Rus political system was also heavily influenced, if not copied from the horde (or rather, the 'ordo', since our vision of what is a horde is now so wrong it isn't funny).

      You have to know that the political organization of central Asia nomads stayed stable from before the Xiongnu until the 19ty century, and their administration was as good, if not better than the Ottoman one until cheaper method of making paper was found in the 15th century.

    • Domestic reindeer (which, in Europe, is all of them - except for a small non-domesticated group in the southern mountains of Norway, and the Svalbard reindeer).

      Domestic reindeer were domesticated by a nomadic people, or at least not an agricultural one. When that's said, they don't look "tame" like cows or sheep, but on the other hand anyone who's been involved with bringing in sheep which have spent the whole summer by themselves in the mountains will want to discuss how "tame" sheep can be.. (source: Myself, as a child I joined in the "hunt" every September for many years to help collect my grandfather's sheep)

  • Now one could ask question is that process itself a form of agriculture? And that in these cases agriculture and domestication happened together.

    • I think it's the other way, right? ..That farming/agr and livestock are both examples of domestication (of plants and animals). The root of the word "agriculture" is specific to plants (ager, agr = fields).

You're replying to an article about the Botai, whose sites lack evidence for domesticated crops like other early horse cultures.

Horses were domesticated thousands of years prior to the development of agriculture.

  • Other way around. Horse domestication was around 5000 years ago. Agriculture started around 12000 years ago and by around 8000 years ago had spread pretty widely.