What a pleasure to read. While we focus on the bow technology, the culture that enabled the level of horsemanship they required also may have some intrinsic fea

What a pleasure to read. While we focus on the bow technology, the culture that enabled the level of horsemanship they required also may have some intrinsic features, as riding a horse is the equivalent to strapping in to an Iron Man suit. It's a 1000lb body with four independent legs, and with super human strength, speed, vision, smell, and hearing, and a hypersensitive relation to its environment that you learn to literally direct with your mind. The being senses your intentions and accepts them as its own, and you interpret its enhanced senses as your own in turn. That symbiosis is some real inter-being mind-meld stuff. Before heavier techology, the use of animals in warfare must have been completely overwhelming. Culturally, just relating with such a rich nonverbal physical presence would have been a different experience of their environment. If a group of Mongol horsemen rode up on some agrarian villagers, the gravity of what they were encountering must have been clear - animals in nature deferred to them. When I'm asked why I still ride in a world like todays, I often respond that it develops an essential human quality of connecting with other beings. Also, if things ever went apocalyptically bad, we also know that there are no kings without horsemen. It's an enjoyable hedge.