The "Analyzing Horseback Riding Just For The Fun Of It!" Story

It ws an ordinary day.  Talking with my wife about going horseback riding.  She spent many an hour riding her horse, Blackie, when she was in high school.  Rode with a neighborhood friend throughout the southern parts of Lancaster County, near Martic Forge.  She got her horse when she was fifteen and kept him until she no longer had the time necessary to care for him and sold him.  I was reading a story recently that told of archaeologists finding that the earliest direct evidence of those who did horseback riding was found in 5,000 year old human skeletons in central Europe.  Researchers analyzed more than 200 Bronze Age skeletal remains from museum collections in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to look for signs of what Helsinki anthropologist Martin Trautmann calls "horse rider syndrome."  He found six tell-tale markers that indicate a person was likely riding an animal by examining the person's hip sockets, thigh bone and pelvis.  Reading bones is much the same as reading a person's biography.  Wear patterns on the hip sockets, thigh bone and pelvis can tell if a person has been frequently riding an animal.  Researchers found that studying human skeletons works better than analyzing horse bones since human bones are more readily preserved than horse bones.  Researchers examined bones from humans that lived around 4,500 to 5,000 years ago and belonged to a Bronze Age people called the Yamnaya.  They claimed they could read the bones of humans like biographies since they were much better preserved and it was much easier than examining the bones of the horses.  There was evidence for harnessing and milking of horses, but this is the earliest direct evidence so far for horseback riding.  The Yamnaya culture originated in what's now part of Ukraine and western Russia, an area called the Pontic Caspian steppe.  So, why do we examine horses and people to see how long they have been riding?  Your guess is as good as mine.  Just another fact that can be used to fill up the screen on the computer.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.