LSAT 151, Section 1, RC Passage 2, Domesticated Horses

RC Passage 2 Explanation

PASSAGE TEXT: Through years of excavations and careful analysis of her finds around Krasnyi Yar …

Paragraph Summaries

1. Olsen found many horse bones at Botai sites in Kazakhstan, which may show early horse domestication and riding. Since wild and domestic horse bones look alike, she uses age and sex patterns to figure out whether the horses were hunted or domesticated.
2. The Botai horse bones don’t fit the usual pattern for meat or milk herds, since many male horses were fully grown. But they also don’t fit ordinary horse hunting, so Olsen suggests the Botai may have kept adult males alive for riding.
3. Some horse remains include nearly complete skeletons, which hunters probably wouldn’t have dragged back whole. These remains, along with carefully arranged horse and human burials, suggest that the Botai’s relationship with horses went beyond simply hunting them for meat.

Analysis

This is an inference passage. Olsen doesn’t have a smoking gun like “here is a 6,000-year-old saddle.” She’s building the case from patterns that would be weird if the Botai were only hunting horses.

The age/sex evidence is the fussy part. With goats and other domesticated meat/milk animals, you’d expect young males to be killed off and females kept alive. The Botai horses don’t show that. So at first, domestication looks less likely.

But horses are different. If the Botai were hunting wild horses, they probably would’ve targeted family groups, not scattered male groups. That would produce fewer adult male bones. Instead, Olsen finds lots of adult males. Her explanation: maybe those males were kept because they were useful alive for riding.

The full skeletons are the more intuitive clue. A wild horse is huge. If you just hunted it for meat, you probably wouldn’t drag the entire carcass home. Whole skeletons near dwellings make more sense if at least some horses were already under human control, or if domesticated horses helped transport hunted ones.

The author’s position is supportive but not definitive. It’s not proof that the Botai definitely domesticated and rode horses. The passage is saying the evidence points that way.