From ancient civilisations to industrial revolutions: How horses shaped the world we live in today

Navigating the streets of London today, you might find yourself dodging everything from cars and cabs to motorcycles, e-bikes, pedestrians or even those annoying electric rental scooters. One mode of transport you likely won’t see much of in 2024, outside of the occasional novelty or tourist carriage, is the domestic horse.

But in fact only a handful of decades ago, the city streets of London and other urban centres around the world were abuzz with horses – with everything from agriculture to travel, communication and military taking place on horseback before the 20th century. In 1894, horses in the city were so numerous that The Times in 1894 proclaimed that “in 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure”. So where did all those horses come from, and where have they gone?

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Understanding domestic horses and how they built the world we live in today is a question that’s especially important to me. I grew up in Montana in the western United States, the grandson of a Montana rancher and son of a cowboy-turned-lawyer. I spent my childhood in a house filled with the trappings of horse culture, filled with paintings of western landscapes, mirrors made of horse harnesses and gaudy brass horse lamps. 

At the same time, I lived in the suburbs, and hardly ever spent time around horses or livestock. As I began my career as a scientist, I was motivated by a deep curiosity about the history of horses and people, in part as a way of understanding my own family’s story. 

In my new book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, I outline what science has learned about our incredible and complex relationship with horses, and what it means for us in a rapidly changing world today. 

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In the book’s first of four “beats”, I explore how horses evolved in the grasslands of the ancient world, developing incredible adaptations to life in the prairies, from their speed to their specialised teeth and digestive systems to their complex, rich communication and social lives. New scientific discoveries show how early hominins encountered and hunted horses at a strikingly early date – with finds like those at Boxgrove in the UK, showing that by more than half a million years ago, human ancestors were not only eating horses but also using their bones for tools. 

As the first human art emerged tens of thousands of years ago, horses were a muse of Paleolithic painters and carvers alike. But how did horses make the move from an important prey animal to mode of transport? In the book’s second section, I lay out a new and rapidly emerging story around the horse’s initial domestication – showing that the process played out millennia later than was once assumed, on the shores of the Black Sea more than 4,000 years ago, with the aid of new technologies and changing relationships with other animals and plants.

Despite their late arrival horses almost immediately reshaped the ancient world, not only transforming herding life in the steppes, but also shaking up the balance of power as horse-mounted warriors toppled civilisations from ancient Greece to Egypt, the Indus Valley and China within only a few centuries. 

In the book’s third section, I lay out new archaeological discoveries from East Asia and Mongolia and trace the ways that innovations in technology in these areas helped riding become more secure – connecting disparate areas of the Eurasian continent for the first time, and helping to forge global trade routes like the Silk Road and Tea Horse Road. Horses made their way across the Sahara to the great savannah of the Sahel, and equestrian empires took hold across new corners of the world, including West Africa. 

Hoof Beats concludes by investigating how the partnership between horses and open-ocean voyaging brought domestic horses across the Atlantic and the Pacific, where these animals partnered with Indigenous horseman to sustain resistance to European colonisation, even amidst an industrialising world. 

Though mechanisation spelled the end of the era of the horse in many important ways, our modern world owes much of its current form to the cultures, connections, and lifeways that were built on horseback over the last four millennia. 

Today, it’s clear that even in a modern city like London, horses still have important roles to play – from the Horse Guards to equestrian sport, agriculture, cultural heritage and more.

Hoof Beats by William T Taylor is out now (University of California Press, £25). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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