Q14

[ben9990]

Could you explain why the wrong answers are wrong?

I chose A but wasn't sure about it.

[ohthatpatrick]

Let's remind ourselves that Olsen's hypothesis is that the Botai were actually riding domesticated horses.

Her evidence:
- tons of horse bones (but it's not clear if they were domesticated horses to be ridden, or wild horses that were hunted for their meat)

- if the horses were hunted or domesticated for their meat, we wouldn't see many adult male bones. But we see tons of adult male bones.

- lots of the horse skeletons are full skeletons (if they had hunted horses for meat, they would have broken down the skeleton into smaller, easier-to-drag pieces) and some of the skeletons are buried with humans (as though a human who got used to riding a horse became friends with it and sentimentally wanted to be buried with it).


(A) butchered horse bones = using horses for meat
untouched horse bones = suggests they were used for riding instead

(B) The quantity of other animals' bones is irrelevant.

(C) Comparing what was going on at this site 6000 years ago to what's happening today is irrelvant.

(D) "Other species of animal" is irrelevant.

(E) The proportion of dead humans to dead horses is irrelevant. It sounds like there aren't that many human bones to begin with, so the ratio will be low but not tell us anything. It was the PROXIMITY of human bones to horse bones, not some RATIO, that made Olsen think that humans had fallen in love with their horses


This is definitely a tough question to process, but since the author was never making her case by referencing other animals, (B) and (D) are clearly irrelevant. Since she wasn't making her case by referencing modern conditions, (C) is out.

I think most of us get down to (A) and (E), and with (E) there's nothing we can say about high ratio vs. low ratio that would argue more in favor of "used them for meat" vs. "rode them".

With (A), we at least have some codewords for "used them for meat" vs. "didn't use them for meat".

In case you're not familiar with the term "butchered horse bones", think of a butcher, whose job it is to break down an animal carcass into ready-to-cook cuts of meat.

Hope this helps.

[Yu440]

Hi I found D tempting. I thought A wasn't really relevant to Olsen's hypothesis because even if the percentage of untouched horse bones is low, it doesn't disprove that fact that there were indeed some untouched houses, hence the possibility of them being domesticated and ridden.

I thought D was relevant since if the mortality patterns in the remains of the other species of animal found at Botai sites were similar to that of the horses, then perhaps the Botai people were unique in their herding/hunting habits and differed from other civilizations dramatically. Is this just too much assumptions

[ohthatpatrick]

Strengthen / Weaken answers don't prove or disprove, so we don't want to hold them to that standard.

You're right that there are definitely SOME untouched horse bones in the samples examined by Olsen. I think (A) is referring to a NEW source of information, so (A) is saying, "if we were at a new Botai archaeological site, would it be relevant to Olsen's work what the number of butchered vs. unbutchered horse bones are?"

Sure. The more untouched horse bones there are, the more we become convinced that they weren't just slaughtering horses for meat.

Would it be relevant to Olsen's work what the mortality patterns of other animals at these sites were?

Possibly. It's just way more speculative. It's also made more difficulty by the fact that the author pointed out a couple ways in which analyzing horses is different from analyzing other animals:

- with horses, you can't just tell by looking at their morphological differences whether they were wild or domesticated

- with horses, it's actually better as a hunter to go after families than to go after the big, beefy males.

Because horses are discussed in this passage as a tricky mystery to solve for their own special reasons, it would be harder glean much about horses by comparing them to other animal species.

In general, I don't like an answer in RC until I can put my finger on the line(s) that supports it. With (A), I feel a little safer, because I can't point to lines 43-46 to reassure myself that I know from the passage that whole carcasses vs. broken down carcasses is relevant.

With (D), I'm not sure what line we'd put our finger on.