I dunno—seems to me like anyone in Central Asia seeing that image in that era would immediately associate it with Azhdahak, the mythical Zoroastrian demon-king with two snakes protruding from his shoulders: …wikimedia.org/…/Bowl_Depicting_King_Zahhak_with_…
I wondered what the heck a “true” saddle was supposed to be, but it looks like they roughly defined it as a treed (wooden frame) saddle with stirrups attached.
I can’t seem to parse whether the tree came before the stirrup – it’s implied but not stated – but it looks like a single mounting stirrup was invented before paired riding stirrups. I’ve seen a Native American (Cherokee? IIRC dated about Removal Time) saddle that was basically just a tree, presumably used with blankets above and beneath for comfort, without any indication of rings for girth or stirrup attachment, but that doesn’t rule out looping them through the gap between the tree bars (where the spine floats underneath).
It was/is a trend within the last decade or so to use a treeless saddle for more “natural” horsemanship (whatever that means), and I’m sitting here wondering what that means for stirrup attachment. Layered on top of the girth, I hope, for stability. Gonna go fall down the google-hole.
In the interest of horse-girl infodumping, I recall seeing some at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK, and luckily they have some pics for their online collection, thank you Gilcrease.
This one actually has stirrups, looks like the girth attachments are more sophicated than my Dunning-Kruger ass imagined, but the stirrup leathers are, in fact, looped over each of the wooden bars: collections.gilcrease.org/object/84985
The Dominicans are certainly reinforcing stereotypes about ignorant religious zealots. Worried about losing the church they built literally on the ruins and corpses of the Zapotecs.
Flintknapping is extremely prone to finger and hand injuries, and nobody understood infection back then. Probably everyone was making and using stone tools constantly. Might explain things.
Collard and colleagues first published their finger amputation thesis a few years ago but were criticised by other scientists, who argued that the amputation of fingers would have been catastrophic for the people involved. Men and women without fully functioning hands would be unable to cope with the harsh conditions that prevailed millennia ago.
Sounds pretty fair.
Since then, Collard, working with PhD student Brea McCauley, has gathered more data to back the amputation thesis. In a paper presented at the European Society conference, they said their latest research provided even more convincing evidence that the removal of digits to appease deities explains the hand images in the caves in France and Spain.
Oh really? Sorta interesting, okay, what’s the evidence?
The team looked elsewhere for evidence of finger amputation in other societies and found more than 100 instances where it had been practised. “This practice was clearly invented independently multiple times,” they state. “And it was engaged in by some recent hunter-gatherer societies, so it is entirely possible that the groups at Gargas and the other caves engaged in the practice.”
…
That is not convincing evidence.
Sure, it’s possible. If someone assembled some data that showed that in the modern day, ritual amputation is way more common quantitatively than accidental loss of digits, and showed that they were able to reject some other plausible explanations (e.g. showing that there wasn’t a particularly cold climate in that area that would cause frostbite to be more common than normal), then sure. But that’s not this paper, it sounds like.
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