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How The Oriental Horse Arose and Diverged

The Turanian horse, in all its forms, goes back a very long way.

We know that the prehistoric horse came over from North America at the time of the last Ice Age, and soon after that time, four types of horse are noted in the fossil record. Whether the types split from one archaic Horse which left North America, or four types of horse came from there is unknown. The horse or horses seem to, for the most part, have followed the margin of the ice sheets across Eurasia, each becoming more specialized for the environment into which it settled as the ages passed.

Two basic kinds arose--the pony, suited to a wet, cold climate, and the horse, suited to a warmer, dry climate. While ponies were built to dodge a predator in swampy and forested areas until a hiding place could be found, horses were built to run, to run fast, and to run far--hiding was not an option.

Horse Type 3 is the horse which inhabited Central Asia, where the continental climate is in the main dry, but the steppes are vast, hard and for some parts of the year, forage is plentiful. This was the tallest of all the different types, and seems to have inhabited the Turan Flats and possibly ranged, either on its own or through human intervention, as far as Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. This was the main ancestor of the Turanian horse in all its present forms.

Which prehistoric horses evolved into which modern breeds--or even, into which ancient breeds--is a matter of lively debate. The many ways of addressing this question often lead to very different conclusions.

It is, for example, widely accepted by Arabian Horse enthusiasts that the Arabian represents the oldest and purest breed of horse in the world. Lady Wentworth, writing in The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants, opined that the Arab should be "a separate species, Equus arabicus, because there is nothing anywhere like him and there never has been." Yet recent work to establish the genetic relationships between the various breeds and types of Oriental Horse show that this may be more a matter of legend than actual truth. Work in progress at the University of Kentucky shows a "family tree" more like this (this is a large file, please be patient):

  It should be kept in mind that even though it appears that each branch of this tree represents a horse who was "bred apart in purity" from horses on other branches, this is not the case. While "breeding in purity" or "breeding for type" was certainly the tendency, conditions of geography, trade and politics saw to it that there were many infusions of the blood of one branch into the blood of another. Legends and marketing aside, there was really no such thing as an absolutely "pure" breed until the advent in the 18^th century of Stud Books. To the people who bred and used the horses as a means of obtaining a living, what a horse could do was ultimately more important that what it was.

 The Turanian horse developed over time partly from the uses to which it was put and partly as a result of its environment. It was tall and long, to run a long way; while the Proto-Arabian became shorter and more compact, to run and dodge. The Turanian horse had (and its modern representatives still have) smallish hooves to facilitate navigation over hard, often stony ground; the Arabian of old had large hooves to facilitate maneuvering on loose sand.

The earliest human presence in the Turan area dates back 300,000 years, and the first settlements were along the shores of the then-much-larger Caspian Sea, and date back as much as 9,000 years. Settled agriculture was found along the southern end, and horse and cattle raising along the northern shores. As the Caspian dried up and the land became less arable, agriculture diminished and livestock rearing moved steadily southward.

"The Original Ancestors of the Turkoman, Caspian Horses," Louise L. Firouz, The Akhal-Teke Quarterly, Summer 1998

The Pazyryk Horses

Among the earliest Turanian horses we know about at the present time are those found in the Pazyryk kurgans or mounded tombs. These tombs date from the time of the Scythians, and some are as much as 6,000 years old. Pazyryk is itself a plateau at the spring of the Kizil River, approximately where China, Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan all meet on the western edge of the Sayan mountains, or on the easternmost border of the Turan Flats.

Several horses of two distinct types have been found, frozen and in many cases almost perfectly preserved, in these kurgans. One is probably the ancestral Yabou; the other is undoubtedly a Turanian, an ancestor of our present day Turkomans.

The most perfectly preserved of these Scythian horses is a 12 to 15 year old mare of about 13 hands high, about average height for Scythian horses. She was dun, with the glow typical of the Turkoman strains today, and was saddled with highly ornamented bone, wood, leather and felt tack, including a "stag mask" with large stylized antlers, and her tail was tied together into a single long strap. In conformation, apart from her size she was virtually identical to the modern Turkoman. She was known to be arthritic in her near hind stifle, which probably rendered her quite lame--which might have been one of the reasons she was chosen for her sacrificial death, which occurred, evidently, from a blow to the forehead. Or, since the arthritis had progressed so far, she may have been one of the buried chieftain's favorite mares, cared for in so far as was possible until she could be buried with her owner.