Researchers say they’ve found the earliest evidence of horseback riding not in the bones of ancient horses, but in their riders.
on populations from central Europe to the Caspian Sea. Today, archaeologists call them “eastern cowboys” for their livestock herding and highly mobile lifestyle.
As part of a research project on the Yamnaya expansion, Martin Trautmann, an anthropologist at Helsinki, and colleagues looked at more than 50 skeletons excavated from grave mounds in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria—the western frontier of Yamnaya expansion. The Yamnaya were well-fed, healthy, and tall; the chemical composition of their bones showed protein-rich diets consistent with herding cattle and sheep. But the skeletons showed signs of distinctive wear and tear.
One Yamnaya man, buried around 2700 B.C.E. in what is today Romania, had all the bone alterations routinely seen in horse riders, plus spinal damage from a hard fall “on his backside,” the authors write. “In a medieval population, it would have been clear this guy was a horse rider,” Trautmann says. “As so often in archaeology, the coolest finds are the ones you’re not looking for.”
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