Reading 2

The following passage is adapted from an article titled “From the Horse’s Mouth” by Andrew Lawler (© 2005 by Andrew Lawler).

1. Measuring teeth from dead
2. horses in upstate New York seems
3. an unlikely way to get at the truth
4. behind some of the most
5. controversial questions about the
6. Old World. But David Anthony,
7. a historian and archaeologist,
8. discovered that by comparing the
9. teeth of modern horses with their
10. Eurasian ancestors, he could
11. determine where and when the
12. ancient ones were ridden. And
13. answering that seemingly arcane
14. question is important if you want
15. to explain why nearly half
16. the world today speaks an
17. Indo-European language.
18. The origin of Indo-European
19. tongues has roiled scholarship
20. since a British judge in
21. eighteenth-century Calcutta
22. noticed that Sanskrit and English
23. were related. Generations of
24. linguists have labored to
25. reconstruct the mother from
26. which sprang dozens of languages
27. spoken from Wales to China.
28. Their bitter disputes about who
29. used proto-Indo-European,
30. where they lived, and their
31. impact on the budding
32. civilizations of Mesopotamia,
33. Iran, and the Indus River Valley
34. are legion.
35. To unravel the mystery
36. of Indo-European, he taught
37. himself Russian to closely
38. examine archaeological reports in
39. obscure Soviet-era journals
40. mostly ignored in the West. What
41. he found were not the remains of
42. crude barbarians living on the
43. distant fringes of the civilizations
44. blooming five thousand years ago
45. on the banks of the Nile, Indus,
46. and Tigris and Euphrates.
47. Instead,  these peoples of the
48. steppes  stretching from Bulgaria
49. to Turkmenistan made quick and
50. efficient use of the newly
51. invented wheel, mined ore to
52. forge metal tools and weapons,
53. and lived in substantial villages
54. and towns.
55. But did they ride?
56. Cowboys without steeds can’t
57. cover much territory. Horses
58. would give any population on
59. the grassy stretches of the
60. steppes an enormous advantage
61. in trade, warfare, and plain old
62. pastoral migration. That mobility
63. could be one way to explain the
64. spread of the language which
65. then morphed into a variety of
66. tongues throughout Eurasia.
67. Based on linguistic evidence,
68. Anthony estimates that
69. proto-Indo-European flourished
70. between 4000 BCE and 3000
71. BCE before dying out by 2500
72. BCE. Yet clear representations
73. and mentions of horses don’t
74. appear in the Near East until
75. about 2000 BCE. Archaeological
76. evidence until recently has been
77. difficult to obtain, since wild and
78. domesticated horses look alike.
79. Anthony realized that one
80. creative way to tell the two apart
81. is to look a horse in the mouth.
82. Collaborating with his wife,
83. archaeologist Dorcas Brown,
84. he measured the wear on the
85. teeth of autopsied horses. Then,
86. with a small grant, he bought five
87. unbroken horses and stabled
88. them at the State University of
89. New York at Cobleskill. He and
90. his students fashioned a variety
91. of bits that may have been used
92. five millennia ago, made from
93. hemp rope, horsehair, bone, and
94. leather, rather than the metal
95. favored today.
96. Then the horses had to be broken
97. without using equipment. The
98. trainer put Anthony in an
99. enclosed paddock to show him
100. how to achieve dominance using
101. body motions alone “It was a
102. stunning lesson,” he recalls.
103. After a half hour, the wild horse
104. responded to his movements as it
105. would have to a lead stallion.
106. “Since then, I’ve been up to my
107. elbows inside horses’ mouths
108. at least once a month.”
109. After his students rode each
110. horse for one hundred and fifty
111. hours, they found that even these
112. organic bits like hemp rope wear
113. down teeth, demonstrating that
114. such wear and tear would show
115. up on the molars of ancient
116. domesticated horses as well.
117. Taking advantage of the
118. Iron Curtain’s collapse, Anthony
119. and his wife visited museums
120. across the former Soviet Union,
121. measuring old teeth in
122. dusty collections.
123. He and Dorcas determined
124. that horse teeth from two sites
125. in northern Kazakhstan dating
126. from 3500 BCE to 3000 BCE
127. showed bit wear. Other scholars
128. remain unconvinced, given
129. the small samples. Anthony
130. attributes some of that
131. skepticism to the hothouse world
132. of archaeozoology. “Dory and I
133. are seen as interlopers—neither
134. of us is a trained zoologist—and
135. we have had a hard time
136. getting accepted.”