Back in the Ice Age, Europe was full of wild horses. People hunted them and ate them, and painted their pictures on the walls of caves.
Hi, Mr. Nature here. Note the sophisticated artistic style employed by the supposedly primitive caveman. Note the shape and colors. And now, I will leave for a minute to go fetch something from youtube. I’ll be right back, so don’t go away.
All right, here it is, live at the Cincinnati Zoo, but actually native to Mongolia–Przewalski’s Horse, a dead ringer for the horses painted in the caves of France and Spain and Germany. Did the ancient artist get it right, or what?
These beautiful animals came close to being wiped out, but we’re happy to tell you they’ve been saved in just the nick of time. We ought to be good stewards of God’s stuff. If we’re not, how is He to trust us to be stewards of greater things?
It’s almost as if they Ice Age Europeans were as smart as modern people. Of course Joe Collidge would be able to tell us that wasn’t true. 🙂
Here’s something I find hard to understand.
Supposedly those cave paintings are the oldest art we’ve got. Yet they display all the marks of a fully-developed artistic tradition and are as technically sophisticated as any art ever produced by anyone.
But fast-foward, supposedly tens of thousands of years, to what are called the beginnings of civilization–and the art really is primitive. It’s crap, to speak frankly. Stick figures, like a little child would scrawl with a crayon on the wall.
How did that happen?
I dunno, it’s almost as if science has gotten something wrong, but we all know that could never happen. 🙂
I find it interesting to see something someone drew on a cave wall thousands of years ago. Although they probably did not think of it as art as we do today. The horse is pretty cool too, I’ve never seen that breed before.
The Americas didn’t have horses until the Europeans came, and they didn’t have knowledge of the wheel. Transportation must have been slow in America’s prehistoric days.
There were horses here, though, long ago. They seem to have died out before the Paleo-Indians could decide what to do with them. There was an “American zebra,” too (see Archives).
I’ve read an interesting theory that the reason the American Indians stayed in the stone age is because they didn’t have many large animals that could be easily domesticated, unlike in Europe. For one it meant they were extremely limited in how far they could travel. Before the horse was introduced to the Americas they used dogs to help them, but that was very limited. Likewise, they had no large domesticated animals to help them farm or build things. So without animals like the horse and ox, they couldn’t progress technologically to the next stage.
That makes a lot of sense.
We saw plenty of these wild horses in Mongolia, they’re small and incredibly tough; the nomadic people don’t provide shelter for the herds they manage and the winters are brutal. They actually milk the mares and turn it into fermented milk, which quite frankly smells as foul as it tastes. We were given the opportunity to milk the mares and I have just posted a photo of it, probably the best of the bunch. Hope you can check it out.
Wow, what were you doing in Mongolia?
I looked on your site for that picture, but didn’t find it. But those who know me, know that if there’s anyone who will fail to perform even a simple function on a computer, that person is me.
Aw, that made me chuckle. I spent two weeks touring, mostly grassland, steppe and sand dunes. It is a vast country! We spent some time with the nomadic people, saw lots of temples, samples some inedible cuisine and had the most other-worldly experience imaginable.
Here’s the link: https://planet-dom.com/2018/02/05/mongolian-adventure/
I’ve tried to read everything Roy Chapman Andrews ever wrote about Mongolia. He fell in love with it.
Oh, I’ll have to check him out.
I recommend his young readers’ novel, “Quest in the Desert.” In this book, his love for Mongolia is front and center.
Thanks for the link. Aaaah….