The History of the Horse
The horse or at least some of its early ancestors have been around for about 50 million years. For a great many of those years, the history of the horse parallels that of man.
History
The earliest ancestor of the modern horse was a little animal that was about as big as a medium sized dog. It was call Eohippus, or the dawn horse. It had four padded toes on its front feet and three padded toes on its back feet. Over millions of years of evolution, this early animal began to gradually change into the horse breeds we know today. The necks and legs began to grow longer and the four padded toes disappeared. There were at least two other early pre-historical horses known as Mesohippus and Pliohippus. Almost as soon as early man emerged, the history of the horse and the history of man began to merge.
It is known from early cave drawings that early man hunted the horse for food. There is some speculation that early man might have domesticated the horse very early and raised it for food like cattle. It is possible that they even milked them. This is not known for certain, however, as no hard archeological evidence exists to support this theory.
What is known is that somewhere around 5,000 years ago, man decided the horse had better uses than as food. It was around this time that the horse first appears as a mode of transportation and a partner in work. The horse was used to pull the chariots of the Egyptians and Hittites and wild horsemen swept out of the northern mountains to subdue early Babylon mounted on fierce trained war horses..
Although pre-historic horses did live in North America, modern horses were not present until they were brought here by the Spanish. Some of these horses escaped and became the wild mustangs of the west. These horses were later captured by the plains Indians who quickly mastered them. Among many tribes, horses were a sign of wealth and the plains Indians were known as some of the best light cavalry of all time.
Meanwhile, horses were being carried across the ocean from Europe to the Colonies. These horses were used to pull plows and farm wagons. They were also the major form of transportation either being ridden or pulling carriages. The horse served in the Revolution and most of the wars that followed up until World War II when the truck and the jeep mostly replaced them. In 1920, there were still an estimated 2 million horses in the United States, but today the number is slightly under 1 million. The horse is no longer a military or work partner. It has been left behind by the advent of motorized transport and now is ridden for recreation or raced for entertainment.