Bones, bridles and bits – but where’s the horse?

The German cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff has written that horses have as many meanings as bones. In the archaeologist William Taylor’s new history of horses and humans, we meet all those bones. Found in thawing permafrost, in caves, and buried ceremonially in graves in Siberia and Chile, the bones are cracked open by Taylor to show how the horse evolved in the Americas before its early encounters with human hunters.

Then came domestication, transforming the species from near extinction to tool and symbol on every major landmass on the planet. After that, horses and their keepers created empires, paced epically long trade routes – and brought plague from the steppes. There is not much in Hoof Beats from contemporary textual sources and little about later chunks of horse history, but Taylor writes clearly and compellingly.