Will Taylor’s new book in A&S Magazine | Anthropologie

The new book by Professor William Taylor“Hoofbeats: How horses shaped human history”, in A&S Magazine. In the book, Professor Taylor writes that today’s world has been shaped by man’s relationship with horses.

Almost a million years ago in what is now southern England, the ancestors of man called Homo heidelbergensis made tools from horse bones. About 30,000 years ago, people throughout Europe and northern Eurasia regularly painted horses on cave walls and carved their likenesses from bone and ivory.

“The bond between humans and horses is one of the oldest connections we have with the animal kingdom,” says William Taylor, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and curator of archaeology at the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History.

But Taylor says the real turning point came about 4,000 years ago, when people first domesticated horses in the grasslands near the Black Sea.

And when that happened, the impact on the world and the centuries that followed, according to Taylor, was not a gradual development, “but a sudden jolt, a shock to the system” that affected almost every aspect of human life – revolutionizing things like transportation, agriculture and warfare.

“After their domestication, horses spread like wildfire, invading new societies and forming new partnerships with humans, shaking up the structures of the ancient world almost everywhere they appeared,” he explains.

Learn more about Professor Taylor’s research and book in A&S Magazine