Odp: Cowboys on Horseback

----- Original Message -----

From: markodegard@...

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Monday, November 01, 1999 2:25 PM

Subject: [cybalist] 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.

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Dear Mark,

 

The domestication of European cattle took place some 8500 years ago, antedating the first horsemen by millennia. The first neolithic communities of Western, Central and Northern Europe already kept cattle derived from the local subspecies of the aurochs. I agree that the tending of herds was rendered much more effective by the introduction of horse-riding; but at the time when the first mounted cowboys appeared in Central Europe pastoralism was regularly practised by much of its farming population. Riding was by no means the principal use of the horse immediately after its domestication; it was used mainly as a draught animal -- and eaten, too.

 

Now, the advantage that riders had over pedestrian cowherds was obvious in the case of large free-ranging herds in the open grasslands of the Pontic area, Central Asia or modern Hungary, but for equally obvious reasons nomadic pastoralism could not become the dominant occupation of the ancestor of the Germani, Balts, Slavs, Italici or Celts. How did your cowboys manage to dominate woodland Europe linguistically without being able to deploy their economic advantages?

 

The American South and the Plains were colonised by people with a central political power to back them up, and with superior technology (from the cotton gin and modern firearms to the telegraph and the railway in the later phase of the conquest); so was Siberia. The linguistic domination of Latin in much of Roman Europe was achieved thanks to the combined military, political, ideological and economic strength of the empire. The contrast between the Pontic horsemen and the European farmers was of a different nature, even if the former were warlike and heroic-minded. They could raid and pillage, perhaps marry into the local elites, but I do not think they were capable of imposing permanent power structures. And even if they were, they would not necessarily retain their language in the process. England is not French-speaking, after all.

 

The only IE Big Bang I can imagine in connection with horse-riding was the Aryan one, involving as the most important ethnic element the Iranian-speaking tribes. With my chronology of IE dispersals THAT was what happened before 2000 BC. The later Turkic, Mongolian and Ugric Big Bangs were secondary to it; again, their lasting effects were typically restricted to areas where the natural conditions were favourable to nomadic pastoralism. The Huns for a few decades managed to harass and debilitate the Roman Empire, collect an annual tribute from Rome and help themselves to the wealth of the provinces, but after Attila's death the Hunnish dominion evaporated.

 

Piotr