The Moment Everything Accelerated
Around 3500 BCE, on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the grasslands stretching across what is now Ukraine and Kazakhstan, humans first began riding horses rather than just eating them. The evidence comes from bit wear on the teeth of horses excavated at Dereivka, a site studied extensively by archaeologist David Anthony, whose work on the Proto-Indo-European world traces the entire downstream consequence of that single shift. Before domestication, a human on foot could cover roughly 25 to 30 kilometres in a day. A rider on horseback could cover 80. That gap is not a convenience. It is a civilizational rupture.
