Horses Through The Ages

Honoring a renowned specialist in studies of ancient horses, Equids in Time and Space: Papers in Honour of Vera Eisenmann edited by Marjan Mashkour includes 18 chapters by 22 international paleontologists, archaeologists, anatomists, historians, and other experts on living and extinct Equus and related horse relatives. There is also an introduction providing a brief review of Dr. Eisenmann’s life and career. The volume is not without some substantial flaws, but remains a useful acquisition for anyone interested in the history and prehistory of these important animals. The book is hardcover and oversize. Typeface is generally clean and sharp; figures are grayscale and of varying quality, depending upon the author(s). The volume is divided into five more or less equally-weighted sections: geographic distribution, Paleolithic horses, domestication, methodology, and anthropozoology. Equids earlier than the latest Tertiary and Quaternary are not discussed in any detail, reflecting Dr. Eisenmann’s focus on more geologically recent horses. The investigative approaches employed are extremely diverse, including historic and paleontologic literature reviews, interpretations of old and new metric indices, uniand multivariate statistical analyses, and assessments of stable isotope chemistry in fossil equid teeth. The four papers comprising the geographic distribution portion of the volume demonstrate the diversity of investigative methods employed. Deng reviews late Pleistocene Przewalski’s horses from China, using carbon isotopes from dental enamel to suggest that Przewalski’s horses, as arid-adapted animals, can be used to track the waxing and waning of the East Asian monsoon through time. Foronova examines numerous late Pleistocene sites in southern Siberia, determining through dental morphology and morphometric analyses of metapodials that caballine and hemionine horses were all present in the region, but in varying abundance through time depending upon local climate. Pichardo reviews the published literature on late Pleistocene horses from North and South America; this study is unfortunately hampered by an unfocused presentation and an incomplete selection of reference works [several important J Mammal Evol (2008) 15:147–149 DOI 10.1007/s10914-007-9063-5