Comanche Feats of Horsemanship-George Catlin

A horse culture is a tribal group or

community A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...

whose day-to-day life revolves around the herding and breeding of

horse The horse (''Equus ferus caballus'') is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of ''Equus ferus''. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 mi ...

s. Beginning with the

domestication of the horse It is not entirely clear how, when or where the domestication of the horse took place. Although horses appeared in Paleolithic cave art as early as 30,000 BCE, these were wild horses and were probably hunted for meat. The clearest evidence o ...

on the steppes of

Eurasia Eurasia ( , ) is a continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. According to some geographers, Physical geography, physiographically, Eurasia is a single supercontinent. The concept of Europe and Asia as distinct continents d ...

, the horse transformed each society that adopted its use. Notable examples are the

Mongols Mongols are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia, China ( Inner Mongolia and other 11 autonomous territories), as well as the republics of Buryatia and Kalmykia in Russia. The Mongols are the principal member of the large family o ...

Mongolia Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south and southeast. It covers an area of , with a population of 3.5 million, making it the world's List of countries and dependencies by po ...

, the Scythian and Turkic nomads of

Central Asia Central Asia is a region of Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian language, Pers ...

, the Plains Indians, the Guaycuru peoples of the Gran Chaco, and the

Mapuche The Mapuche ( , ) also known as Araucanians are a group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. The collective term refers to a wide-ranging e ...

and Tehuelche of Patagonia after horses were imported from

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

, particularly from

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

, during the 16th century.

History

History offers many examples of horse cultures, such as the

Huns The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. According to European tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was par ...

and other peoples in Europe and Asia. Horse cultures tend to place a great deal of importance on horses and by their very nature are

nomad Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pa ...

ic and usually

hunter-gatherer A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived Lifestyle, lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, esp ...

or nomadic pastoralist societies. For example, the arrival of the horse in the Americas altered the cultures of the Native Americans in the Great Plains, the Gran Chaco and Patagonia. The horse increased mobility; the ability of the horse to cover a lot of ground in a very short period of time allowed native people to easily move from place to place, bringing on a nomadic shift in their culture, with an impact on transportation, trade, hunting and warfare. However, there were also disadvantages to adopting horse culture, such as the increased responsibility of caring for the horses and keeping them healthy.

Social structure In the social sciences, social structure is the aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of individuals. Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally rel ...

s of the community also had to shift to accommodate the physical space for horses to graze and feed easily.

External links

Orland Ned Eddins, "Spanish Colonial Horse and the Plains Indian Culture"

References

Anthropological categories of peoples Horses in culture Indigenous culture of the Great Plains {{Ethno-stub

History

See also

External links

References