Thread by @JimMillward

Some too-loose writing by @nyt @KatherineKornei about early horse riding in Xinjiang. Mistake is saying that Xinjiang in 350 BCE was "China": it wasn't politically, and it wasn't culturally. (Thread)
nytimes.com/2020/11/13/sci…

Story says scientists found "oldest direct evidence of horseback riding in China" and implies this is riding by Chinese or proto Chinese, in contrast to "neighboring civilization" in Mongolia. But western boundaries of Zhou and Qin empire were some 1700 km east of these burials.

People in Shirenzigou and Xigou were "neighboring" proto-China too, just like Mongolia was. So these were not Chinese horse burials, but burials found in PRC. Abstract in Proc of the Nat'l Acad of Science @PNASNews makes the same mistake pnas.org/content/early/….

Note sites on map with horse burial cites: Zhou states, Qin empire reached only circa western leg of Yellow R oxbow. Scientists fell in political trap, since XJ has not "always" been part of "China" as PRC asserts (PRC took it in 1949, Qing empire in 1759). But it is also...

Bad archaeology! I'm not splitting hairs here. This is just like saying that a site in Scandanavia, say, was "Roman" when it lay 1700 km outside the Roman frontiers and dates from 150 years before the founding of Rome. Such a cultural and political attribution is plain wrong.

Perhaps the authors mean that these XJ sites, intermediate btw Kazakhstan horse skeletons w/ riding wear and tear, and Chinese agricultural / urban sites, thus suggest something about paths of introduction of mounted equestrianism in China.

But they are not evidence of Chinese horse riding per se.

I've seen this a lot with science articles: eg bio studies on say lactase persistance in non-Han pop in Mongolia, XJ, referring confusingly to them as "Chinese" without distinction when mere decades ago these populations were pastoral (and not Chinese) thus dairy dependent.

From what I can tell, this finding provides no evidence of horse-riding among sedentary agricultural populations of north China plain where proto-Chinese states were forming. Curious what Nicola di Cosmo thinks.

The classic example of this error is "China invented skiing" because petroglyphs in the Altay Mts. of XJ look like skiiers. No: PRC took control of territory formerly in the Qing empire, which conquered territory where is found signs of skiing by early indigenous people:

chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/20…