Today, an adventure on horseback. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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I recently saw an old Japanese movie. It was a ghost story, with horse-mounted Samurai charging about like cowboys in an old-fashioned Western. But Japan is an island. So, I began wondering how and when horses arrived there.
And here we must backtrack: We see horses as Eurasian animals, brought to America by invading conquistadors. Well – not so simple. Let’s put Japan on hold for a moment, and ask how horses evolved. When we do, we might be in for a surprise.
It turns out that horses actually evolved here in the Americas, some four million years ago. Then they migrated to Europe across the land mass that once linked Alaska to Siberia. (We call that link Beringia.)
And humans also migrated, but in the opposite direction, from Asia into the Americas. Here, they ruthlessly hunted horses as a food source. Soon, we had no more horses.
Then Beringia melted back into the sea. We now had people in the Americas, and horses in Asia. No more horses in America until Spain brought them back. That was hardly five hundred years ago.
We find early human awareness of Eurasian horses in the eerie Lascaux Cave paintings. But, there too, horses were the prey of stone age hunters. Domestication came much later in Asia – some five thousand years ago, beginning around Kazakhstan.
Now – back to Japan: A half million years ago, horses migrated there while Japan, too, was still linked with Asia. Then that land connection vanished. And horses died out. Some time around the fourth century AD, Korean migrants brought horses back into Japan. There, they first were food, but the Japanese soon began riding them.
And I’m back to my movie. Turns out it was accurate in showing Samurai riding like cowboys – or like medieval European knights, for that matter. They could wield weapons, loose arrows, and fight on the move. But to do so, they needed a stirrup.
Riders in the west didn’t have functional stirrups until the mid-eighth century. Many Asian cultures used flat boards to support both heel and toe. But: Stop and picture a cowboy standing, sitting, and moving around. The foot has to rotate in the stirrup. It took a far more minimal stirrup to make that possible.
Such stirrups finally appeared in Europe. That led to armed knights with lances. But Japanese made stirrups for action, three centuries earlier. Horseback samurai were wielding weapons on horseback long before those armored European knights.
And I’m left pondering how so small a thing – a minimal stirrup – could play such a huge role in human history. How it made a killing machine out of that gentle beast – so often a friend to us humans.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Further sources and reading:
About that Japanese movie: See Kuroneko - Wikipedia
See Domestication of the horse - Wikipedia
About the Lascaux cave paintings: Horse (c. 15,000-10,000 BC) – Cave Paintings – Artchive
About stirrups in Europe: Stirrups | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
About mounted combat in early Japan: Horses in East Asian warfare - Wikipedia
About stirrups in Japan: Abumi (stirrup) - Wikipedia
About a minimal 5th century Japanese stirrup: Stirrup (Wa Abumi) | possibly Japanese | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A pair of 18th C Japanese Stirrups: A Pair of Abumi [Stirrups], SIGNED KANAZAWA JU UJIKIYO SAKU, EDO PERIOD (18TH – 19TH CENTURY) | Christie’s
About the Japanese art of horse riding: Bajutsu - Wikipedia
This paper details the adoption of stirrups in Japan: Sasaki Ken’ichi: Adoption of the Practice of Horse-Riding in Kofun Period Japan: With Special Reference to the Case of the Central Highlands of Japan. JAPANESE JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 6 (2018): 23–53 See: 6-1_023.pdf
This episode first aired on August 18, 2025.