Tag: Domestication of the horse

The First 1 Percent

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Mitt Romney’s Oldenburg mare, Rafalca, is competing in London for Olympic dressage. Stephen Colbert has declared “competitive horse prancing” his Sport of the Summer, pointedly mocking the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for looking like a 1 percent aristocrat. After all, though Rafalca’s price is undisclosed, when the Romneys bought the horse in 2006, dressage prospects of her caliber cost as much as, if not more than, an average American home. Her annual overhead of more than $77,000 is double that of the average American family’s. No wonder the elite equestriennes gracing this month’s Town & Country are all billionaire princesses. Even at sub-Olympian levels, the animals are expensive.

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Whence the Domestic Horse?

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Shards of pottery with traces of mare’s milk, mass gravesites for horses, and drawings of horses with plows and chariots: These are some of the signs left by ancient people hinting at the importance of horses to their lives. But putting a place and date on the domestication of horses has been a challenge for archaeologists. Now, a team of geneticists studying modern breeds of the animal has assembled an evolutionary picture of its storied past. Horses, the scientists conclude, were first domesticated 6000 years ago in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe, modern-day Ukraine and West Kazakhstan. And as the animals were domesticated, they were regularly interbred with wild horses, the researchers say.

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