Horses

This thread is to talk about the development of horses, different horse breeds and how horses were used by different civilizations and influential throughout history.

Edited by Slick - 03-Feb-2007 at 03:40

I didn't see the recent film adaptation of Beowulf, but someone told me one interestingly realistic thing about it was that they had the people riding extremely small horses, as they would have at the time.

There were horses in the Americas, even before the Spanish arrive. The peoples of the land ate them, and they were extinct and forgotten(have nothing to prove this, I just remember reading about it). Until the Spanish arrive and were though to be Quetzalcoatl, the long returned exiled god.

Edited by The Canadian Guy - 07-Feb-2007 at 23:17

Has anyone ever heard of Sable Island?  It's a small island off the Eastern coast of Canada and there is a small population of feral horses on it.  However they are not native:

The island is home to over 250 free-roaming feral horses which are protected by law from human interference. The best evidence for the origin of the horse population is that they are descended from horses confiscated from Acadians during the Great Expulsion and left on the island by Boston merchant Thomas Hancock, uncle of John Hancock.

In the past, excess horses have been rounded up and shipped off the island for use in coal mines on Cape Breton Island, or to be sold, but the Government gave full protection to the horse population in 1960, and they have been left alone ever since.

(from Wikipedia)

aricle about The turkoman horse also abit about the arabian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkoman_Horse

TY Pinguin for that info. I read about that too, but I failed to put Montezuma in it.

Indeed. It is possible history had been different.

Spaniards had the Phillipines already.

Yes, The Dutch acted very civilized in Japan, while they commited theirs crimes in Africa and in the Americas. What a bunch of pretenders

Well it is believed that chariots were developed before people rode on horseback. At Sintashta in Central Asia they have found chariot burials from 6,500 years ago approximately.
The Sigyynae people of the Danube were noted for their breeding of horses. These are not believed to have been ridden, but used for chariots.
The Samarans of Eurasia (Steppes) were believed to have horses domesticated but not ridden at around the same time, as bones and frozen remains have been found.

People supposedly first begun to ride on horseback -on mass- with the onset of the iron age, where proper bits could be used to control the horses, and selective breeding/domestication allowed them to ride on the back. Despite this, I don't believe that there is any one people -as of yet- who were known to have first rode the horse.