Shaping horse power: bones to unravel human-horse relationships from domestication to the modern breeds – SPUR

Horses and humans share a long history of interactions from the initial domestication to the standardization of modern breeds. Domesticated horses revolutionized mobility and transformed the organization of past human societies. In turn, humans have optimised their performance, improving their speed, strength or endurance. Whereas variation within current horse breeds is easy to perceive, past forms are poorly comprehended. Indeed, most of our knowledge of the past role of the horse and its breeding is based upon written sources, but they generally provide limited information about the horse itself. In that respect, archaeological horse bones represent the best surviving testimony of the morphological but also functional characteristics of past animals. My project investigates how humans have shaped horses over the four last millenia. The aim will be to better understand the evolution of their interactions and thus to gain insight into how horses have in turn impacted human history. Cutting-edge approaches will be used to characterize bone structure both externally, internally and biomechanically. These data will then be confronted to historical narratives, to document past horse uses and breeding. Besides its contribution to the knowledge about past horse roles, this project will enhance our understanding of the human impact on animal diversity.