Cowboys on Horseback

kir-@... wrote:

Piffle. People manage cattle afoot without trouble. There are very few mounted cowboys in Wisconsin managing their dairy herds. How did the first horse wranglers manage to get their mounts; from cattle-back?

First, I'm not that Mark Odegard (there are actually three of us on the net, one is a geologist, the second is a lawyer, and then there's me). We hang out in different areas of the net; I'm the one found in the humanities fora chatting about language and its history.

My comments were limited to free-ranging cattle. The Masai,of course handle their cattle without horses, but they are also known as extraordinary runners.

Modern cattle, especially dairy herds where one has only one bull or so to keep the ladies contentedly well-serviced, represent thousands of years of selective breeding. 3,000-4000 years ago, you were not that far removed from Bos primigenius--the aurochs. Behaviorally, the critters would have been closer to what modern bull-riders or bull-fighters encounter. The distinction  between cattle then and cattle now might be compared to the present-day distinction between reindeer and caribou (they are the same species,  Rangifer tarandus, the former being the considerably more tractable domesticated strain).

With a dairy cow, her need to be milked is sufficient to cause her to return to the barn twice a day. This behavior is absolutely predictable and, as a consquence, she can be allowed to range freely. A heifer or a dried-up cow, however, takes some watching, though her affection for her herd and familiar surroundings will keep her nearby.

Herds of free-ranging (unfenced) beef cattle ('beeves' as they are called in Texas) have to be rounded up. Even today, such cattle often need some physical encouragement if they are to driven to where you want them. A 4-wheel drive vehicle, or a motorcycle can substitute for a horse, but getting all the animals moving towards the same place requires the cowboy to have something more than what his own two legs can do.

I believe it was the Indo-Europeans who perfected the technique of managing free-ranging stock on horseback, sometime around or just before 2500 BCE. Combined with sturdy, steppe-worthy carts, this allowed them to expand enormously -- both in terms of geographic expanse and in terms of absolute numbers. They were filling what had been an unfilled ecological niche. They were a well-fed (and consequently, fertile) people.

I think it really was a Big Bang. The only real historic parallel would be the expansion of the European population of the US westwards of the Appalachians (and probably, the Russification of Siberia during the same period). It took us less than 100 years to fill a continent, most of it accomplished with little more than ox-drawn carts and wagons. In 1865, a single dominant language was spoken from San Francisco to Baltimore, more than 3000 miles. About 2500 BCE, a single dominant language was spoken for at least an equivalent distance, and probably an even greater one. Excluding the problems encountered with Anatolic and Germanic, all known Indo-European languages are neatly explained by such a scenario.

Mark.