Re:Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts...
by cmrdporcupine on Sunday May 06, 2018 @01:19PM
(#17007227)
Evidence is that horses were domesticated (on the Eurasian Steppe) for meat and milk before they were ever ridden.
So you're probably right that the behaviours that made them docile enough to ride emerged over quite a long time.
The only argument offered for the Why in the title is this one:
> Moreover, zebras have evolved alongside man, whereas European animals mostly evolved in the absence of man (we didn’t migrate out of Africa until relatively recently).
Yet clearly we weren’t such a shock to the horse’s ancestors that we simply ate them all... as we did everything in the Americas. Maybe because of earlier proto-humans? So is this some kind of goldilocks argument?