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(Courtesy Jean Clottes)
Painting, Chauvet Cave, France, ca. 30,000 years ago
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The earliest evidence for encounters between humans and horses is found at Paleolithic sites in Eurasia. Butchered horse bones indicate that early peoples used horses as an important source of food. But these swift and spirited animals also clearly fired the human imagination in ways other animals did not. Depictions of them abound in Paleolithic cave art, where horses appear more frequently than any other animal.
and they are more likely to live through the harsh winters of the Central Asian Steppes:
“Horses are easier to feed through harsh winters than sheep or cattle,” says Hartwick College archaeologist David Anthony. “They are well adapted to winter on the steppe, and can break through ice and snow with their hooves to reach winter grass to feed themselves.” There is indirect evidence, such as bone carvings depicting horses together with cattle, that people on the steppe took advantage of this trait and began to maintain herds of horses for winter meat.
Anthony's book The Horse the Wheel and Language discusses this and many other aspects of the steppe culture that led to the Indo European dispersals. You can download it from Archive.org:
LINK
I have read parts of it: My problem with ebooks is that they are hard to browse to find the parts you are interested in (so you can ignore the rest). But since getting a hard copy is beyond my means, I have ripped it to an mp3 via balabolka, and have excerpts on my "insomnia lectures" that I play when I am trying to sleep.
or just listen to his lecture:
more here:
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