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Quote:
Originally Posted by banjomike
All those doubts of yours are mistaken presumptions.
The Mongols horses were bred for endurance. Endurance makes a superior war horse.
They were not "bred." "Breeding" involves the careful selection process. More advanced civilizations were involved in such process, but Mogols were nomads. They just took what was there.
"A 1918 census of Mongolian animals found 1,500,000 horses. [15] The origins of the Mongolian breed are hard to determine. Nomads of the central Asian steppes have been documented as riding horses since 2000 BC. Tests have shown, that among all horse breeds, Mongol horses feature the largest genetic variety, followed by the Tuwinian horses. This indicates that it is a very archaic breed suffering little human-induced selection."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_horse
What "that time?" 
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"The stirrup was invented in China in the first few centuries AD and spread westward through the nomadic peoples of Central Eurasia.[3][4] The use of paired stirrups is credited to the Chinese Jin Dynasty and came to Europe during the Middle Ages."
Middle ages - that's 5th to 15th century; Temujin ( better known as Ghengis Khan) - that's 1200ies.
(So that you would know.) |
Historically, you're right. The Mongols in Temujin's day probably didn't practice selective breeding as an entire culture. But the Mongols were a huge and very diverse group. While they began on the steppes, many of them didn't always live on the steppes forever. At least half of them chose to take over China and become Emperors and create cities.
But that was a long, long time ago, when very few, if any, cultures practiced widespread selective breeding. But without a doubt, there were some Mongol tribes on the steppes that did practice gelding and selective breeding with their horses.
it wasn't restricted to only horses, either. The Mongols certainly did the same with their sheep and dogs. And probably, their camels.
Selective breeding has always gone on in nomadic peoples, but only in small tribes/families/individuals who saw traits in their domesticated animals they wanted to replicate. It isn't very hard to figure breeding out for humans, so it's been going on forever.
But not in any larger society. The smaller and more remote tribes are where it was first practiced.
We will never know just how many Mongols of Temujin's day did it. But I'm pretty sure Temujin used the tribes that did as his best cavalry of all. And since Temujin remained nomadic himself all his life, for all we know, he may have been pretty good at gelding a horse himself. The skill could have bolstered his reputation, as only the best men at the job were chosen to do it.
When a really good colt's life is at stake, no one wants to kill it and waste it's potential as a war horse. But it's true that the Mongols preferred pregnant mares as war horses. The geldings were probably reserved for the Generals, scouts, and the advance troops, where the male endurance and speed factors really counted.
Stallions are poor war horses unless a cavalry unit has nothing but stallions, kept well away from any mares. Very few stallions will concentrate on war when mares are around, but there are always some that have been so accustomed to war that they learned how to pay attention to the warfare they were emerged in.
But when a wild tribe numbering in the high thousands, all cavalry, went to war, it can be presumed most of them just rode what was available, especially when they could drive wild, unbroken horses with them while on the move. On the move, stallions do most of the herding, so all men need to do is drive the stud, and the horse drives his band of mares.
There are examples of other pre-Western European tribes that do exist that are well documented who practiced selective breeding.
A very good example is the Nez Perce tribe in the U.S. They were the only native American tribe to practice selective breeding in their horses, and the tribe became famous in their world for them.
Every plains tribe west of the Mississippi came to know the Nez Perce, the tribe that bred the Appaloosa horse, long before the first white man ever saw one of those spotted little horses.
The going rate of trade among the tribes for an Appaloosa, the horse the Nez Perce developed in the isolation of the Wallowa Valley region of Oregon & Washington, was 10 to 1.
10 horses any other tribe possessed for 1 Appaloosa. Then Nez Perce never traded their stallions, and very seldom their mares unless they had too many to own. The mares they traded were fertile but not pregnant, and the male horses were all gelded before they were traded.
The reason why the rate was 10 to 1 were fitting with the Indian tribe's way of life. On the plains, where mustangs were widely available, the feral horses became pretty fit through natural selection over time, so they were fine for the nomadic Indians.
But when they needed a war horse, a horse that could outrun a mustang, had such a quiet disposition they didn't panic in a fight and could be caught by a warrior who found himself afoot in a fight, could out-last a mustang on a forced march with enough distance to make a stop safe, and a horse with sounder hooves and better eyesight than a mustang, then the trade was worth it.
Another bonus for the Indians was, when an Appaloosa was finally run to death or killed in battle, it was tastier than a mustang when eaten.
For the Nez Perce, the distinctive spotted coat on their horses was the best advertising possible.
No other horses looked like them, and no others possessed their traits. The horses' spots made them visible and distinctive from great distance.
So when a band of Northern Comanche (for example) spotted more than one Appaloosa in a band coming from miles away, they knew the Nez Perce were arriving for trade.
The Nez Perce were also very fierce fighters themselves, very much like the Swiss. But like the Swiss, they knew the advantages of neutrality and trade.
So if a bunch of Comanche kids spotted the band of horses from afar and decided to steal them for street cred as young wanna-be war chiefs, the Nez Perce would ride into their camp to talk to their Chief.
If the kids didn't surrender the stolen horses, the Nez Perce had 2 ways of getting their trading stock back. The first was to simply cut that band off forever. No more horses for them.
Then the Nez Perce would return later and kill the stolen horses with spots before leaving if possible, leaving the chief afoot and the kids with hell to pay.
The second way was to leave, then come back in force the next time, usually a year later, and kill the entire band.
They could do it because they had the best war horses, and once forced into it, the Nez Perce were ferocious killers. They only left a few survivors, who always told the tale to others.
Sometimes, to reinforce the point, they would drive all the horses they took from the tribe they killed into the next tribe they came across. It helped spread the word not to mess with the Nez Perce.
All the warrior tribes soon figured out it was far better to welcome them than fight them. And they were very welcomed by the fiercest tribes.
So what usually happened was the Comanche chief properly punished the young offenders, gave up a penalty of extra horses in a trade, and the band never repeated the stupid offense again.
In time, the Nez Perce traded horses from their homeland all the way to the Mississippi. And all the way south to the deserts of the southwest. But they never traded slaves. Only horses and fine finished goods. Not to say the Nez Perce didn't take a few slaves now and then themselves; most tribes did on occasion.
If a tribe wanted family connections with the Nez Perce, a child given to the tribe in marriage was never allowed a family visit in the Wallow Valley. The child could come on a trading mission to visit their parents back in their home, but not the Nez Perce's homeland.
Now if this all happened on the steppes of the American west, what is there to prevent a similar thing happening on the steppes of Mongolia? There's a lot of duplication in all early cultures.
Selective breeding is no different from weaving wool. Once sheep are domesticated, every tribe that ever grew a sheep figured out how to weave their wool. Only the methods and weaving patterns differ- a wool blanket is a wool blanket.
Once humans figured out a lack of testicles prevented pregnancy, and applied it to other humans, why do you think they stopped there? Eunuchs are as ancient as the Mongols are.
The Mongolians may not have recorded their selective breeding, but they practiced it. They developed a horse that fit their own needs and culture, so it differs from the Appaloosa, but not by much.
A good war horse is a good war horse only for the terrain the war happens in.
Western Europeans never needed the qualities that are critical in the steppes. So, in their ignorance and arrogance, thought the Mongols were riding scrawny little horses that amounted to dog food. That's only natural when a human uses a horse for plowing or carrying big loads, like big white guys all wearing armor, and when cavalry is only used as a mobile infantry that most often dismounted and fought on foot after a charge or two. Western European tactics for western European terrain.
The Mongol horses did probably have greater genetic diversity than the Nez Perce horses, but not by much.
The Nez Perce were dependent on Spanish genetic horse preferences, but the Mongols weren't. And the Mongols were a much, much larger tribe than the Nez Perce, so it's only natural their breeding preferences differed among themselves.
But don't buy into the selective breeding didn't exist.
That's the same western arrogance that drove Rome to its knees a few times, along with all of Eastern Europe.
And even that wasn't enough to shake the western European arrogance forever; the Crusaders had to re-learn the lesson the Mongols first taught all over again in the deserts of the Middle East before it finally sunk in, many centuries later.
Historians are the most arrogant bunch of all when it comes to stuff like this, I've noticed.
If you want to know about livestock, it's best to go talk to someone who grows them for a living first. It's best to take their word for it, too.
The scholars usually don't know squat about it, and they're always making culturally arrogant presumptions to fill in their gaps.
Scholars read for their living. Horsemen breed horses for their living. Always have, always will be like that.
Archaic genetics only displays how well natural selection works. Life on the steppes is the same for humans as horses- only the fittest survive. So the Mongols are as different genetically as their horses, and both sets of genetics are ancient, because they've shared the same steppes for thousands of years.
Human breeding only uses the best human-connected traits of natural selection. If human selective breeding has gone on for a thousand years, it's only natural that it becomes a part of natural selection. It's no wonder the Mongolian horses display so many archaic genetics.
The tests say nothing at all about ancient selective breeding. Selective breeding in Europe is almost brand-new historically, but since most early civilizations never created very much in permanent record-keeping, how can it be said the practice started such a short time ago in other places?
The scholar simply drew the wrong conclusions from the testing. They're pretty good at that.
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And this of course explains his injuries.
