First evidence for horseback riding dates back 5,000 years

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Archaeologists have found the earliest direct evidence for horseback riding – an innovation that would transform history – in 5,000 year old human skeletons in central Europe. “Horseback riding was the fastest a human could go before the railroads.” Researchers analyzed more than 200 Bronze Age skeletal remains in museum collections in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic to look for signs of what co-author and University of Helsinki anthropologist Martin Trautmann calls “horse rider syndrome” – 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. “You can read bones like biographies,” said Trautmann, who has previously studied similar wear patterns in skeletons from later periods when horseback riding is well-established in the historical record. Because only a small percentage of the skeletons studied clearly showed all six markers of riding horseback, “it seems that a minority of the people at that time were riders – that does not suggest that a whole society was built on horseback riding,” said molecular archaeologist Ludovic Orlando, who is based at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France and was not involved in the research.