THE INEW STONE-AGE 
The Naga tribes northeast of the head of the Bay of 
Bengal furnish an excellent example of the steps in domes- 
tication. These still somewhat wild people have an 
animal of the ox kind, known as the gayal, or mithan, 
which they permit to roam and feed by day in the forests 
but which returns at night to the villages. They never 
employ it for labor, nor do they use its milk. But at re- 
ligious feasts at which it is sacrificed ceremonially they eat 
its flesh. Thus we find the gayal now in a stage through 
which the ox proper passed thousands of years earlier on 
its road to complete domestication by the peoples of the 
New Stone Age, probably in western Asia. 
The peoples dwelling about the great grasslands of the 
Old World, not unlike our own western prairies, hunted 
herds of wild horses for the sake of their flesh and prob- 
ably their skins, just as the Indians used to hunt the 
bison. The finding at Solutré, in southeastern France, of 
the bones of something like 100,000 horses leaves no 
doubt of this use of the horse. To some of the nomadic 
grassland horse eaters, especially the ancestors of the 
primitive Aryan or Indo-European speaking peoples, the 
horse quite naturally became the one animal sacred above 
all others. It grew in time to be associated with the sun 
and with running water, and was sacrificed to these. Quite 
possibly, also, the custom of keeping individuals in cap- 
tivity arose from the desire to insure a steady supply of 
horses for such sacrifices. Later the practice of milking 
the mares sprang up, probably suggested by the use of 
milk among neighboring agricultural peoples who already 
had cattle or goats. 
At first, of course, man used the herds of half-domesti- 
cated horses only for food and ritual practices, just as he 
had used their wholly wild ancestors during the Old Stone 
Age. Their utilization in other ways, such as carrying or 
hauling loads and, much later, for riding, still lay very 
far in the future. We find traces of this earlier use of the 
horse as food animal, as tribal mascot or luck bringer, and 
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