The Rise of the Centaurs: The Origin of Horsemanship. the Untold Story.

By Bjarke Rink

Thousands of years ago, on the central asian steppes, an amazing symbiosis ocurred between horse and man. This blending of two extremely "dissimilar" species would have far-reaching consequences for World History. But what drew men and horses to join forces? Who were the first people to approach horses? For what reason? Who had the improbable idea of mounting a horse and guiding it from a position on its back? And what environmental pressure made this imperative to do so? In this adventure we'll witnes the origins of horsemanship and how horses empowered humans. Riding with the Cimmerians and the Scythians, we will discover how horsemanship upset the power balances of natons. History as told from horseback will give you new insights about the past and a special appreciation for the role of the horse in molding today's world

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491821190

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© 2013 by Bjarke Rink. All rights reserved to the Homo-Caballus Institute.

EQUESTRIAN HERITAGE SERIES

Project manager : Ariane Janér

Cover Design, Maps and Illustrations : Nicole Janér

Photos

Ariane Janér (horseman—front cover), Margi Moss (steppe with horses—back cover),

Instituto Homo Caballus (Bjarke Rink and Zeus), Bengt Janér (horses and child riding horse)

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/19/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2120-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2119-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013917742

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Meet’cha in Moscow

Mentalities at War

Horsemanship, the Engine of Change

Central Asia: the Eye of the Hurricane

A Symbiosis Worth a Thousand Mutations

From Hunter to Herder, a Bid for Survival

Horse-made Children

The Rise of Horse-made People

The Path to Equestrian Maturity

Lords and Ladies of the Great Plains

Unearthing Fossil Democracy

Centaurs, at First Sight

The Discovery of Europe

The Wolf Pack

Wrenching the World off its Hinges

Inside the Predator’s Lair

The Scythians in the Great Game

True Grit, Tough Environment

Bows, Bits, Saddles and Chaos

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Flight of the Peregrine Falcon

High Noon in Assyria

The Peregrine Falcon Strikes

Bye-bye in Baghdad

Epilogue: Live Like Horses

Author’s Note

What I would like to show you in this adventure series is the extraordinary influence of the Human-Horse symbiosis on World History. How humans mounted on horses radically changed the world we live in today, though not many seem to have noticed.

Although the ancient Greeks saw science and art as one, I consider it a pity that Aristotle’s investigative biology did not grasp Phidias’ insightful inspiration: human and horse blended into one well-designed animal—the Centaur—a brilliant visualization of state-of-the-art horsemanship.

While we now have the scientific means to investigate the role of horses and horsemanship in World History, unfortunately, our most brilliant minds haven’t gotten around addressing the subject. Mr J. Bronowski, polymath and human biologist, believed the importance of the horse in European History has always been underrated; this belief must be extended to World History. Richard Dawkins recognizes that a few dozens horses helped Cortes and Pizarro, leading only a few hundred Spaniards each, to overthrow the Aztec and the Inca empires. Mr Dawkins seem to have had something significant in mind, which he didn’t explain. The Conquistadores success in the New World, although horse related, went deeper than Cortes’ horses: it was the effect of thousands years of horsemanship that interconnected Eurasia’s cultures into one body of knowledge superior to the Native American. Would we Europeans, at the speed of our own footwork, not have been stuck in the same cultural morass that the Aztecs and Incas found themselves when we eventually discovered them?

Equestrian Dynamics, the accelerating effect of horsemanship on human affairs, is a missing dimension of modern History writing. To study World History without considering the acceleration of cultural and historical events by horsemanship is like examining a lamp bulb without taking into account the energy that powers it.

As the scientific world has risen to dominance, it is becoming ever clearer that science has a part to play in reassessing World History powered and accelerated by horsemanship. But neither scientists nor historians seem to have given much time or thought to the importance of the matter. So as a horseman with a scientific mind and a keen interest in History, I’ve decided to charge this windmill of historical neglect, armed with a pen.

While seeking new ways to explain an old story, I confess to have entwine History and humor like Beckett, to have shown passionate sympathy with nature like Aksarov, to have hop-scotched from Paleontology to History like Stephen J. Gould. I also confess to believe in Centaurs because, as a science literate horse trainer, I actually understand how human and horses’ nerve systems blend into one galloping unity. And in an attempt to interconnect all historical ages, I have meddled with time travel by using Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that threw open the doors of chronology violations, making it possible to connect all times to all times. So, to travel into the past, I’m not going to ask you, the reader, to hop into a time machine, fire up the engines and zoom back into the past. I’m trying out a new literary formula: you, the reader, is an active character in the book. I’ll brief you on the historical event we’re about to join and discuss difficult situations that we’ll probably be swept into, once we gallop into the past to eyewitness the first stages of human contact with horses. And later we’ll cover the wars that humans and horses, perfectly adapted, will wage on unhorsed or underhorsed people. Be prepared: As war correspondents working in turbulent times we are as likely to get embroiled in battles as the soldiers doing the fighting. So keep your eyes peeled and join the story.

B.Rink

Acknowledgements

Through the years many people have helped directly and indirectly with the writing of this book series, so there are many collaborators to acknowledge and thank. As the full list would become vast I have chosen a few that have decisively added to the concept or helped in other ways to materialize the project. I must thank my first riding master, Col Alfredo Souto Mayor, who taught me that horsemanship moulds human behavior wholesale. Ariane Janér for reading the first batch of manuscripts and pointing out the inconsistencies of the narrative (which were many). Helle Rink, my sister and writer in her own right, who patiently reads my manuscripts and pounces on errors as a fox on a field-mouse. CuChullaine and his wife Basha O’Reilly, directors of The Long Riders’ Guild, provided me with invaluable investigative material on mounted nomads. Alvaro Domecq, the Spanish bullfighter, gave me an important insight into how human and horse blend into one unity when death can be the penalty if a wrong move unhinges the Centaur phenomenon as the bull charges. Kassai Lajos, the Hungarian horseback archer, and reviver of mounted archery in Europe, gave me the notion of the destruction that mounted archers could (and did) inflict on conventional armies. When I felt the need to comprehend the technicalities of mounted archery from horseback, Lukas Novotny, the American archery champion, helped me introduce mounted archery in Brazil. As I, personally, needed to understand the minutiae of the use of the composite recurve bow, Holm Neumann, my American brother, taught me many tricks of the trade. Gustavo Braune, Brazilian veterinarian, gave me many insights into the Science of Equitation—how humans and horses evolved physically to fit perfectly into one moving unity. James Rooney, professor of Veterinarian Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, whose article Riding Reflex Chains opened a whole new world of the horses’ responses to human cues. Martha Roessler, master in physiology of exercise, helped me untangle the neurological puzzle when human and horses’ neurons fire cooperatively in response to each others’ movements. To my wife Mara that feeds me even though I’m thousands of years back in time reporting on the Central Asian horse cultures and their true role in shaping World History.

And, finally, I thank my friend Jorge Ferreira da Rocha, Olympic dressage rider, for making the mind boggling question that started the quest for equestrian truth: what would the world look like today if there hadn’t been horses? As Darwin once remarked you have to pose the right question to find the right answer, Jorge’s quizzical question started my historical search wich ended with the investigation into how humans and horses can become one—a concept that Greek mythology calls Centaur and Phidias, the Greek sculptor, translated into a harmonious combination of human and horse, which is not a myth at all but represents state-of-art horsemanship shown by Central Eurasian invaders of Greece in bygone eras.

For Anita

my daughter, myself

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Introduction

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The Human Paradoxes that changed the World.

Every species must live within its physical boundaries and all animal locomotion systems—legs, wings, tails or coils—are ultimately the key biological feature that determines who is who in the animal feeding chain. Therefore, in a world where speed meant survival, a land-bound creature with an upright un-dynamic posture and outfitted with only two legs had theoretically a poor chance of surviving and much less of dominating the Planet. Nevertheless, we humans did it.

From the un-dynamic shape of the human body we can understand the sort of tools we invent, the kind of cities we build, the vehicles we conceive and the extensive communication systems we create. These are all technological compensations for Homo sapiens’ general lack of speed and natural defenses. Man, the naked, the soft-skinned, the clawless, the fangless, the biped, was certainly the creature least prepared by nature to dominate the run or die environment of the natural world. Homo, however, overcame his original constraints and eventually dominated the planet. How was this feat possible?

If we look back at the Paleolithic Age (the Old Stone Age) and watch human groups struggling to survive in the different parts of the planet, we’ll discover that man’s inbuilt biological flaw—the unfortunate combination of a big brain grafted onto a poor locomotion system—would ultimately be responsible for humanity’s rise in the world. Incapable of gaining headway by speed alone, humans gradually developed the unique capacity of sprinting ahead with their problem solving ideas rather than dashing along on their time consuming legs. This amazing new mental ability, which can be called future memory¹, allowed humans to pierce the morrow in a way that no other animal had ever done before. It was an absolute reversion of the speed-packed action needed to survive in the natural world. With an ever-growing ability to build knowledge and to plan the future man invented tools, learned to forage in groups and began to compete successfully with the other animals red of fang and sharp of claw.

The first decisive technology to overcome human lack of speed—the bow and arrow—spread over most of the planet with certain ease. Any healthy well-trained person could learn to handle the deadly missile launcher.

Then, ten or twelve thousand years ago, the struggle for survival was somehow lightened when humans learned to plant their foodstuff. When nomadic hunter-gatherers started to settle and build villages surrounded by tilled land, this transition was, of course, also a practical solution to spare footwork, humanity’s inborn biological flaw.

However, the more resourceful the human mind, the bigger the chasm between the limitations of human legs and the power of the human brain. At this point of human psychological evolution enter the dominium of the first Neolithic Paradox.

Some five or six thousand years ago, the imbalance between the reach of the human mind and the range of the human legs was definitively broken when herders of Central Eurasia found a way of making the human mind fly at the speed of a horse’s legs. This biological symbiosis, now called horsemanship, opened a new era in human History—the Equestrian Age. In the Equestrian Age human affairs traveled at the horse’s speed and this phenomenon was ultimately responsible for the technological gearshift that accelerated Eurasia’s cultural development beyond the peoples of the Americas, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa—regions that had no horses. As horsemanship spread over the steppe, the new animal combination became the undisputed master of the land. The saga that sprang from the bonding of two superior mammalians—the speedy horse and the brainy human—is now called History, as there is no History without horses and horsemanship.

Nevertheless, the impact of horses and horsemanship on human affairs had a peculiar psychological effect: it accelerated the human Historical Timeline beyond human comprehension. No one seems to have realized the acceleration of History after horse-people learned to shrink time by increasing their bodily speed. (Although after Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Time this should not have surprised the 20th century scientific community.) Then again, as all animal brains are hard-wired to perceive the world at the speed of their locomotion systems, why should modern humans be an exception? This can probably explain the change blindness that seems to have deluded chronologists since Herodotus into believing that History has rolled under the human bridge of time with unchanged speed since Genesis.

To help correct this oversight, I have coined the expression equestrian dynamics to indicate a new reference of time that progressively accelerated human activities as horsemanship sped up the circulation of information, the machinery of government and economic and cultural exchanges. In a nutshell: equestrian dynamics is the sum of the speed of all equestrian activity applied to human affairs throughout the Equestrian Age—let’s say from 3000 BC to 1900 AD—which accelerated human History beyond human speed².

The new energy, however, produced a byproduct akin to enriched uranium, which I call Equestrian Power (cavalry). Like nuclear power cavalry gave its controllers military sway over non-equestrian nations or states with low-grade Equestrian Power. The spread of equestrian dynamics and its sub-product, equestrian power, completely changed human relations both within a society and among nations. Horsemanship provoked a tidal wave of horse mobilizations that slowly swept the globe and equestrian power became the fuel of empire building in Central Asia and beyond. It can be said that a non-horsed people never made it politically beyond the status of a city-state.³

Watching the Equestrian Age unfold before our eyes, a second paradox catches our attention: a mystery we’ll call the second Neolithic Paradox. How could the Central Asian pastoralist nomads, stranded in the Neolithic Age and, relying solely on superb horsemanship and straight shooting, disrupt and frequently conquer the technologically superior sedentary civilizations through the dawn of History to the Renaissance? How could nomadic horse-people shape greater Empires than the technologically advanced civilizations that built cities and produced a mass of practical inventions to transform the environment for human needs? What are the facts behind the second Neolithic Paradox?

There is reason to believe that the so-called primitive cultures, living within their ecological boundaries, developed a great capacity for communication with animals in a way that city people could never imagine. This factor may shed new light on the evolution of the equitation phenomenon. However, let’s first try to spell out what evolution of the equitation phenomena means, if we agree that horsemanship is a search for animal communication and adaptation that starts with human and equine understanding each other’s behavior and motivations, as highly sensitive, or symbiotic equitation, undoubtedly is.

The mounted archers that evolved on the steppe were a product of their environment; they were perfectly integrated pieces of steppe ecology where horses and humans had coexisted for thousands of years. What distinguishes the Central Eurasian horse-people is the fact that the nomads chose the horse as the key feature of their culture and shaped their life in accordance with the horse’s nature. They were the only people on earth who went through all the evolutionary phases of horse relations, from horse hunters in the Paleolithic Age, to the symbiotic relationship that made them masters of the herd until, after centuries of interaction, the herder learned to pool his mental and physical resources with the horse to create one galloping unity. The only person ever to have captured the essential image of Horsemanship was the Greek sculptor Phidias who created the image of the Centaur—which celebrates to perfection the state-of-the-art horsemanship, responsible, to a great extent, for the world as we know it today.

If you believe that human learning springs from environmental apprenticeship, you can understand that the intimacy that formed Central Asian horsemanship could hardly be replicated by a sedentary population living in the city away from their horses. But, unfortunately, the nomadic horse-people’s superb equitation has always been judged from our restricted view of nature, brought about by an unnatural upbringing in urban environments. Therefore, only a brain that has ceased to understand can have produced the city-wise notion that humans and animals are unable to communicate.

In this book, we’ll start by galloping thousands of years back into the Paleolithic Age to investigate the circumstances that led Homo sapiens to seek the symbiosis with Equus caballus, and witness how humans broke into the horse’s private world and stole the leadership from the herds. We’ll pick up the trail of the founder population of horsemanship, an unknown people that lived north of the Black and Caspian Sea, perhaps Kazakhstan, ride in their footsteps and watch the environmental hardships that led to the birth of the Centaur. Then we’ll pursue the Cimmerians, the first recorded horse-people, whose legendary vigor made them the top guns of their time. As reporters embedded in Cimmerian cavalry, we’ll witness these horsemen’s irruption through the Greek mainland and their dramatic push of the farming populations into the sea.

In the Bronze Age we’ll travel along the historical fault-line that divided nomadic and sedentary cultures and spy how the ferocious Scythians that inhabited the Ukraine, invaded Babylon and the Middle East, a feat commented in the Bible. After this escapade we’ll accidentally become involved in the razing of Assyria (modern Iraq) in 612 AD by a coalition of Mede armies and Scythian cavalry.

The Neolithic paradox—the ability of primitive people to develop sophisticated philosophies and technologies—will be carefully investigated and, I hope, satisfactorily answered.

To bring the latest archeological discoveries to life, I’m adding flesh to old bones and putting restored weapons into eager hands, so that we can watch the action of the Central Asian horse-people that ultimately turned slow History into fast History.

For our journeys into times past, I have avoided the esoteric time leaps used by modern writers. I suggest we do holistic historical hop-scotching that from a starting position in the present can make all times connect to all times. To achieve these time leaps, I will brief you about the relevant facts concerning the targeted historical epoch, and when our minds are tuned to this particular time, the past catches us! With the help of new archeological research and a bit of imagination we’ll breathe the world as it then was. I’m confident that modern readers, adept at clicking their way into TV, music, finance, science, IT, news coverage, films, and documentaries can easily accomplish the time leap suggested by this type of narrative.

During our march to report on times past, we’ll examine why Equestrian Dynamics ultimately shaped our civilization, and why well-developed minds in healthy bodies will always be the fountain of human happiness, not to say survival. I hope you don’t mind a little humor along the way, for I don’t think that historical matters must necessarily be handled in a solemn and circumspect way. I actually believe that a little fun along the way may help us understand long-lost times. And once again, don’t forget that when I say you I always mean you, my reader and traveling partner, holding the book in your hands. So when the past catches us put your imagination fast backwards and plunge with me into the times when horses and humans joined forces to shape History as we know it today.

Now let’s be on our way to Moscow, the Trans-Siberian railway, and the Eurasian steppe where our journey into the History of horsemanship begins. Bring your favorite horse, even if this wonderful creature only lives in your imagination, and let’s hit the trail towards the greatest adventure in the human journey in time.

Saddle up partner, we can do it.

Meet’cha in Moscow

As we had arranged, here we are in Moscow where our adventure into the worldwide spread of equestrian power begins. After clearing our camping gear through customs at Domodedovo Airport and getting the horses through the vet-check—no small undertaking in a country that seems to have done its best to sweep its great equestrian heritage under an oriental carpet—we hire a van and head for a State-owned farm for the quarantine—not us, the horses.

Because Russia is one of the westernmost extremities of the original land of the Centaurs, we’ll spend the following weeks visiting historical institutions in hope of warming up our research on the origin of horsemanship. No red-blooded horse person should ever forget that it was somewhere on the Central Eurasian steppe—probably in the Ukraine or Kazakhstan, which the saga of horsemanship began as far back as six thousand years, perhaps more.

We set up our headquarters at Pokrovksaya Hotel that offers cozy wooden cabins, set in a bucolic surrounding where we can study maps and discuss our traveling plans without arousing undue suspicion. Russians are a suspicious people (no offense meant by this remark). The place has old-fashioned wooden furniture and rugs, bedspreads of sewn rags and fluffy quilts that provide a homely welcoming atmosphere.

Next morning after breakfast, we start our Moscow tour by visiting the State History Museum, said to reflect the whole of Russian History and culture from earliest times. We hope this visit may give us some insight into how military and civil cavalry expeditions opened this vast country. But strangely, we find that the museum collection, which is said to have 4.5 million exhibits, emphasizes mostly Russian, Western European and Oriental culture—porcelain, glass, gold and silver items, ancient implements and other works of art but makes no reference to horses or horsemanship that made the Russian state possible.

After this shot in the dark, we take a tour of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the gem of Russian architecture, built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century to commemorate Russia’s liberation from Tatar-Mongol domination. Here we must certainly find some jewels of the equestrian strategy that Ivan used to triumph over the finest horsemen in the World. But either Ivan was a terrible horseman or, in spite of his appalling name, terribly pious, the Cathedral and its ten chapels make no reference to horsemanship but is laid out as a house of worship in the Russian Orthodox style. No History of horsemanship here either.

In the afternoon, after a snack of pirozhki, Russian pastries, washed down with kefir, yogurt, sitting on a bench in Gorky Park, we visit the Leo Tolstoy House Museum, a two-storey wooden house of the 19th century and one of the oldest in Russia, which unfortunately only reproduces the atmosphere Tolstoy lived in. Where are the epic tales of War and Peace, the vivid description of military strife in an age when horses and horsemanship tipped the scales of Russian victories over Napoleonic France, the world power of those times? Nowhere. Isn’t it sad to realize that even Tolstoy, a master of the human spirit, credits victory in battle to mere chance events, which he believed made up the unpredictable fortunes of war? Even Napoleon, an artillery officer, knew enough about horsemanship and declared: Without cavalry, battles are without result. Though a masterful writer and not a stranger to horses, Tolstoy could not fathom the fast working mind of an experienced horseman and the metaphysical energy of cavalry warfare, which had tipped the scales of human political power for thousands of years.

Next, we try the Borodino Battle Panorama-Museum, which commemorates the 1812 Patriotic War against Napoleon’s Grande Armée and displays the crucial battle of Borodino in a 115m long and 15m high panorama marquette. The exhibit reproduces the most critical episode in the battle on September 7, 1812, when Napoleon, determined to crush the Russian army by charging his main forces against it… failed. ‘In many ways the greatest hero of the Russian war effort in 1812-14 was not a human being but the horse.’⁴ At the time Russia had the greatest horse industry in the world. Russian heavy cavalry horses were matchless for a union of size, strength, and hardiness, and the number and courage of the irregular light cavalry—the Cossacks, became legendary. As we move around the gallery, we can hear on the sound track the ferocious crash of battle, similar to what we might have heard had we been there. Napoleon showed the traditional Western approach to winning a battle by brute force and not by subtle psychological tactics that the Russians had learned from their Tatar-Mongol overlords, although they don’t seem to realize this (or admit it) and the steppe horsemen are not given their due credit anywhere.

Not finding anything noteworthy to clarify Russia’s equestrian power, we try the Kremlin. The collection of the Kremlin museums is said to be unsurpassed in its variety. Here, we find early Russian firearms made by Russian, Oriental and West European masters, carriages, sledges, coaches and ceremonial horsecloths from the 16th to the 19th centuries. We learn that the armory was set up in 1511 by Grand Prince Vasily III as a court workshop for production and repair of Grand Ducal armaments, ceremonial armor, firearms and other weapons. No more.

The visit to the cavalry office yields a bit more of what we are looking for in precious harness, saddles, coaches and horse apparel. But there are no hints of strategy, tactics, ideas or dreams of freedom anywhere. Only material evidence of military power, collections of arms, decorated banners, religious and ducal symbols. The muscovite city-dwelling curators still measure a civilization by its capacity to make better pots⁵, a common archeological blind spot that will hopefully be corrected sometime in the future.

Fourteen days later, after the Russian bureaucrats have stamped our papers fore and aft, we finally board the Trans-Siberian railway at Moscow’s Krzansky station with our horses and gear and head for Central Asia. We have booked a 2-berth compartment, complete with desks and lamps so we can do some reading during the two days it’ll take to reach Omsk, a city 2.700km from Moscow, which will be our springboard into Kazakhstan and our search for the origin of horsemanship.

Our horses are stabled in a cattle-wagon coupled to ours so that we can personally care for their needs. (Nowadays, there’s nothing in capitalistic Russia that can’t be bought for money.) In the horses’ wagon, we hang our saddles on a meat hook and fold the new saddle blankets in a corner and put our saddlebags and camping gear on top. Our saddlebags have been specially designed for this journey. Fully packed, they weigh only fifteen kilos each are waterproof and contain everything needed for a good night’s sleep. A domed double-faced travel tent, a thermo-light bivvy sack, head lamps, an infra-yellow camp light, a 6-tool pocket knife, a canteen with a water purification system; a lightweight stove that can cook or grill for two and a multifunctional cooking pot; a sturdy compass key chain with watch, thermometer and whistle plus a medical kit with plaster and bandages. Each of us will also carry ten kilos of provisions, to be replenished whenever possible. The gear has been designed to weigh as little as possible and not to interfere with our equitation, even if we occasionally will have to shed our self-respect and run for it. (This will probably happen more than once.) We are aware that to investigate the life of the ancient steppe warriors can be hazardous for our health. Taking a last look at the horses munching fresh hay reaching to their knees, we pat them goodnight and retire to our berths.

After pulling out of Moscow, the train clears the dreary suburbs then rushes through forests, along lakes, following rivers and flashes past remote villages of log-houses and waving red-cheeked children. We settle down in our compartment to check our gear—infrared night scopes, ultra-light binoculars, plus a telemetric telescope and a PPP—personal pepper pistol—that can deliver a knockout squirt at a distance of 7 meters. To help us cover battles, escape pursuit, and defend ourselves in a fix, we’ll carry this ultra-modern equipment into times past. On this journey, we will visit the sites on the steppe where horsemanship is supposed to have been adapted for inter-tribal warfare to dispute grazing rights and, finally, to a site in Assyria where steppe warriors brought down, Nineveh (near modern Mossul), solely by superb horsemanship, straight shooting and cooperative action in warfare. Spreading a map of Central Asia on the desk I start briefing you on the principal waypoints of our research when the train suddenly grinds to a stop in Yaronslavi, a gray shabby industrial town of naked concrete and communist heritage. Instead of getting off to see the dreary sights of one more urban slum, we stay on the train and continue to discuss our project.

I’d like you to know that I first thought of entitling this book The Origin of Equitation; however, in an attempt to come up with a clearer concept of the symbiotic relationship between humans and horses, I renamed it The Saga of Horse-made People. Then, after a gentle prod by Mathew Mackay-Smith, medical editor of Equus Magazine, I changed the title to The Rise of the Centaurs. I hope you like the title.

The train squeals to a stop at Perm a city by the river Kama and the foremost industrial center of the western Urals, which offers more of the gray urban sprawl typical of the brute force technology, Russian style. Spengler, a German historian, thought that cities were festering ulcers on the body of Russia. Once again, we prefer to stay on the train and plan our route into the land of the Centaurs. After loading passengers and cargo off and taking more goods on, the train speeds through the beautiful Russian landscape that with its countless lakes and infinite pine forests reminds one of Canada.

So, while the train speeds towards Omsk, let me tell you about the beginning of horsemanship, which started the cultural split between sedentary farmers and nomadic-minded people, perhaps as far back as 5-6000 years.

Mentalities at War

People with different cultures live in different worlds

Agriculture is a fantastic method of planting a seed that will miraculously sprout into hundreds of duplicate seeds and this cornucopia radically changed the way humans lived their lives. However, when a certain group of hunter-gatherers decided to settle on a given piece of land to plant their foodstuff—a fruitful oasis, say, a fertile valley or productive river delta—this occupation must have caused friction with other hunter-gatherers who’d resent that one group should suddenly decide to settle definitively on a juicy piece of the environment and call it their land. As people clustered around these havens to raise crops and build dwellings, they automatically formed closed societies, excluding outsiders by building palisades, walls and fortifications to guarantee their safety in case of attacks from discontents and marauders. Whoever watches the evening news can see that, besides global warming, nothing has changed much in the last 10,000 years.

Hunter-gatherers who decided to stop daily foraging and form a sedentary farming community must obviously have had a different mindset from the people who preferred to roam freely across the landscape in search of nature’s varied opportunities. The word sedentary, is related to the Latin sedêre, which means sitting down to plan a course of action. So, there can be no doubt that people who are born with a sedentary mentality will tend to sit down to plan any action, in contrast to people who can act successfully on the spur of the moment (our language is full of equestrian metaphors).

Sedentary behavior reveals a long term mindset, indicating a type of person who prefers the drudgery of agriculture that pays off in security from famine in winter, rather than run the risks of a wandering life where success or failure depends too much on chance encounters with fortune. A sedentary way of life would form a sedentary mentality with specific priorities such as the concepts of clearly demarcated boundaries for the exclusion of others, the possibility of amassing private property and, if possible, shirk labor in the fields by becoming Pasha, King, Caesar, Kaiser, Czar, Sultan, Pharaoh, Emperor, President, Prime Minister, or by claiming a (very) close relationship with any of these princes, if one could get away with it.

In the new food producing communities that developed throughout southern Asia, the techniques of how to build better houses and stouter defenses would be the first step to insure the inhabitants’ security against excluded elements and looters. The second step would be to amass riches by increasing the agrarian yield through slave labor, then move into town, grow fat and lord it around in a litter. The third step would be to raise a militia of have-nots to man the defenses. (Believe it or not, this humbug was still operative in many places around the world when this book went into print.) In contrast to the food-producing way of life, the hunter-gatherer economy that fueled Homo Sapiens’s existence for hundreds of thousands of years is characterized by a short-term mentality focused on gathering food and hunting to provide for the family for a couple of weeks.

The settling down of a