Evidence exists of man’s earliest relations with horses over 20,000 years ago and, though details of prehistoric times can be murky, something not in reasonable dispute is that prehistoric man hunted horses long before domesticating them.
Horses haven’t changed much since ‘caveman’ times; equines are an ancient species that retain their natural instincts. Cavemen could have harnessed the horses available … yet it took tens of thousands of years to even begin learning how to do so.
Taming horses required a strikingly new attitude, something quite beyond the ‘kill eat food’ pattern prehistoric humans lived by. Once early man did change its outlook on horses, a whole world of possibilities opened that were unimaginable before.
The lesson of prehistoric horses is that the world can have potential that exceeds not our grasp … so much as our attitudes.
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Copyright © 2010 John Allen Royce, Jr.
