Outline: The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Timothy C. Winegard, c. 2024.

The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Timothy C. Winegard, c. 2024.

Part I
Early Interactions

Chapter 1
The Dawn of the Horse: Equine Evolution and Bone Wars

Chapter 2
Straight from the Horse's Mouth: I Am the Grass, Let Me Work

Chapter 3
Eat Like A Horse: Human Hunting and Vanishing Habitats

p. 59: "Robert Drews of Vanderbilt Universityin Early Riders: The Beginnings of Mounted Warfare in Asia and Europe, 

Chapter 4
Hold Your Horses: Steppes of Domestication and the Agricultural Revolution

Chapter 5
A Horse by Any Other Name: The Indo-European Domination of Eurasia

Part II
Forge of Empires

Chapter 6
Behold a Pale Horse: Apocalyptic Chariots and Imperial Ambitions

Chapter 7
Riders on the Storm: Cavalry, Assyrians, Libraries, and Scythians

Chapter 8
The Education of Alexander: Academia and Empires

Chapter 9
My Kingdom for a Horse: The Hitched Fates of the Chinese and Roman Empires

Chapter 10
Dark Horses: Feudal Knights and Contenign Faiths

Chapter 11
Road Apples: The Medieval Agricultural Revolution and the Making of Modern Europe

Part III
Global Trails

Chapter 12
Shuttling the Silk Roads: Mongol Hordes and Eurasian Markets

Chapter 13
The Return of the Native: The Horse and the Columbian Exchange

Chapter 14
Big Dogs of the Great Plains Horses, Bison, and the Downfall of Indigenous Peoples

Chapter 15
Spiritual Machines: The supremacy of the Horse

Chapter 16
The Final Draft: War, Mechanization, and Medicine

Chapter 17
Equus Rising: Wild Horses, Therapeutic Healing, and Worldwide Sports

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Notes

Index

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Notes

Chapter 4
Hold Your Horses: Steppes of Domestication and the Agricultural Revolution

Mentions Harari (Sapiens) again. 

Gatherers and hunters, and then first agriculture: under that form of subsistence, our planet's maximum estimated human carrying capacity falls somewhere between ten million and one hundred million humans.

The Earth's population now: more than eight billion people.

If we condensed our modern existence of roughly two hundred thousand years into one hour, we have been domesticated by plants and animals for only about three minutes (or five percent of our stay as Homo sapiens), and this farming package has been the sole human provider of sustenance for around one minute (1.7 percent). Farming is a peculiar institution and intrinsically unnatural.

Whenwe tamed plants and animals, they also tamed us -- p. 63.

Then the history of "food." Begins on page 64.

Irrigation: domestication of water. I assume "irrigation" also includes building dams.

Chapter 5
A Horse by Any Other Name: The Indo-European Domination of Eurasia

 

At the end of chapter 4: over 5,600 miles to the west, at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, another, perhaps even more momentous, encounter was unfolding. With the advantage of their doomesticated horses, predatory Indo-European peoples spilled out of the steppe and confronted the relatively egalitarian and wall-less agricultural societies of "Old Europe" -- which promptly vanished.

The entire cultural fabric of Neolithic Europe (and the Indian subcontinent) was rapidly, fully, and completely replaced with the hierarchy, customs, genetics, and language of these mounted marauders. This wholesale remodeling established a more militant, capitalist, male-dominated culture that has been both the bane and the blessing of Europe. As a relatively small, densely populated region without walls or even stable borders, Europe and its shifting states were vulnerable to invasion and, through successive generations, manufacture some of the bloodiest wars the world has ever witnessed.

Now, chapter 5. 

3400 BCE

Global smelting of copper:

• 5000 BCE: origins, Turkey
• 2800 BCE: China
• 2300 BCE: British Isles
• 2000 BCE: Andes Mountains, Peru
• 900 BCE: West Africa

American anthropologist, Edward Sapir, often considered one of the founding fathers of linguistics.

History / discussion of language.

3000 BCE: past tense; Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language to which English belongs.

All extant European languages, save Basque, Finnish, Magyar, and Estonian, below to one of eight contemporary main branches of Indo-European: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic.

Note:

William Jones: mathematician; close friend with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmond Halley. Introduced the symbol π. His son, in the late 1700s, Sir William (sic) Jones, London, with a fascination for everything India, began to uncover the clues left by our ancestors with PIE to unravel the secret meanings and enigmatic stories behind their words.

Then the history of developing PIE.

"Horse" became a huge word to sort out.

Horse, wheel, and wood are words that are absent from PIE.

3500 BCE: horse-based culture on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. 

The root PIE word specifically denoting a domestic horse (*ek'wos) traveled with these nomadic Indo-European (Yamnaya) pastoralists --> Eurasia, India, and the Middle East.

Then many root words following from *ek'wos.

Horse is the only animal to appear in the personal names of early Indo-Europeans. See examples in footnote at bottom of page 97.

3400 BC: the equestrian lifestyle spread quickly.

Neolitic Europe: 6000 BCE to 3400 BCE: history, page 101.

First Yersinia pestis-ur probably seen between 6000 BCE and 3400 BCE in Europe.

Old Europe was ripe for rapid conquest and exploitation. -- p. 102

The history of global expansion of horse.

Part II
Forge Of Empires

Chapter