Comments by "" (@benghazi4216) on "The First Horse Riders | Horse Domestication on the Eurasian Steppe" video.

I think the focus on if horses that have "taken the bit" is clouded by our own biases. Just because it's an ancient way to do it doesn't mean the first horse riders stumbled onto that technology, which is so effective that we haven't changed it for millennia. I have seen plenty of animals being ridden without having to "take the bit". Most memorable was a family in South East Asia who were riding a water buffalo with just a nose ring, one rope, and a stick. For the sake of argument, why wouldn't the first horse riders have used just a noseband as a starting point? That seems much more plausible as the first attempts to master horse riding. And it leaves no "wear and tear" record for us to find. So we have to be lucky with a burial, and not any burial but one that preserved rope. Problem is, the first horse riders would have needed time to come to that point where they bury horses with gear in a cultural sense, which takes time, and clouds things for us.
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