BONES, BONES, BONES

By permission of the editors of Archaeofauna, we are able to let you access recent publications with my colleagues Robert M. Timm and Greg Campbell. These papers are written in the style required by the technical or professional literature and they contain some material, especially concerning multivariate statistical analysis, that may not be very familiar to readers here. Plus -- the papers are not about horses but dogs! For over ten years I was the 'zooarchaeologist' or bone identification specialist at a Roman-era archaeological site in England called Vindolanda, which produces a lot of bone including remains of a whole array of different kinds of dogs.

 

This is why these articles will be of interest to readers here: nearly 2,000 years ago, during the late Iron Age and the Roman Empire, people in Europe were just beginning to cotton on to how to do selective breeding of domestic animals. The first domestic species they learned to do this with was dogs, followed by sheep and goats, then cattle, and finally horses. The principles and general method are similar for all mammals. Ancient peoples of course did not understand genetics, but they certainly had figured out two key requirements: one, that the breeder must sequester females that are in heat; and two, that the breeder must select the male animal as well as the female for whatever desired characteristics, and must keep offspring from the selected parents only.

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NOW THAT YOU'VE READ THE DOG PAPERS AND "MAMMALIAN SPECIES", it's time to step back for the longer view presented by the sequence of horse fossils found in rock strata worldwide, and what these remains imply concerning the evolution of the horse. I prepared the three papers at left in 2002, especially for the benefit of many students who asked me for the information. There are a number of authoritative books on the subject of horse evolution (see Bruce MacFadden's and also the classic by George Gaylord Simpson, for example). Rather than run over ground that has already been covered, these three papers are worth your time if you're interested in the personalities who established the modern science of vertebrate paleontology. Part II surveys change in horse morphology over time in terms of both biomechanics and the ecological niche occupied by different species. Part III gives an extensive bibliography on this old and important subject.

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PROBABLY THE SINGLE MOST REQUESTED DOWNLOAD FROM THE E.S.I. KNOWLEDGE BASE over the years has been what we fondly refer to as "The Ranger Piece." It began life as a reply that I gave to an inquiry through the Forum; in response to professional criticism I revised it to include more basic data. This subject is also covered in downloadable .pdf's on the following EQUUS Magazine and Eclectic Horseman pages, but the original paper continues to be a valuable and interesting read. Most owners involved in Thoroughbred racing are shocked to discover that no horse is physically mature before the age of six, and yet Kentucky Derby and other futurity competitors are in full work long before this age. Read this paper to get factual information to assist you in deciding when and how to use young horses.

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NOW LET'S DON'T GET TO THINKING THAT A PERSONAL QUEST FOR HORSE MASTERY is all an endless lot of dry technical reading. As I say in the notes to this paper, I'm a crossword puzzle addict and sometimes even write them. You can download these, print them out on paper, and then have some fun filling in the squares. Thus proving that you are not a "square" !

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