The "Did You Know Humans Rode Horses In The Bronze Age!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading about horseback riding 5,000 years ago.  My wife, Carol, loved horseback riding when she was a young girl.  She had her own horse that she would ride over the hills and valleys of Southern Lancaster County with her friend Betty Anne.  When my wife's parents moved to Manheim Township in the mid-1960s, which is to the north of the city of Lancaster, she had to give up her horse as well as horseback riding.  We recently talked about the story that was in our daily local newspaper about horseback riding years ago.  Seems that archaeologists recently found the earliest direct evidence of horseback riding in 5,000 year old human skeletons in Central Europe.  Researchers analyzed a couple hundred Bronze Age skeletal remains in museum collections in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic to look for signs of what a University of Helsinki anthropologist calls "horse rider syndrome" which is six tell-tale markers that indicate a person was likely riding an animal, including characteristic wear marks on the hip sockets, thigh bone and pelvis.  It is possible to read bones like biographies which can show wear patterns in skeletons from later periods when horseback riding was well-established in the historical record.  To do so, researchers read bones like biographies.  The researchers focused on human skeletons, which are more readily preserved than horse bones, in burial sites and museums and were able to identify five likely riders who lived around 4,500 to 5,000 years ago and belonged to a Bronze Age group of people known as the Yamnaya.  In the past, research was able to determine harnessing and milking of horses, but this is the earliest direct evidence so far for horseback riding.  The Yamnaya culture originated in what is now part of the Ukraine and western Russia, an area called the Pontic Caspian steppe.  The study that took place was recently published in the journal of Science Advances.  It is amazing that human skeletons from 5,000 years ago can determine if someone was riding horseback back then!  And, it is also amazing that there are skeletons that old that can tell us what life was like 5000 years ago.  What we as human beings can do never ceases to amaze me.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.