I've been bouncing around prehistoric Wikipedia while trying to fill out some of my knowledge about the world around Ancient Egypt. Something that shocked me was the assertion that horse riding must have predated horse pulling. We have clear evidence of horse pulling via the Standard of Ur from ~2600 BC. There doesn't seem to be evidence of horse riding until much later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse#Driving_versus_riding
This gives us
Thus, on one hand, logic suggests that horses would have been ridden long before they were driven.
What logic is this? In my mind neolithic humans would have understood driving animals (much as driving humans) far better than riding. I assume horses or similar equids were the first ridden animals.
Is there actual evidence to believe that horse riding occurred first? Is this assertion anachronistic as we modern humans associate horses with riding over pulling? Is it possible that horse riding was solely the purview of nomadic tribes for millennia and that early records just wouldn't have shown it?
It seems that Wikipedia's source is not especially familiar with the archaeology of domesticated horses. Near the village of Dereivka in southern Ukraine, archaeologists in the 60s studying the Srendi Stog culture discovered the remains of a horse with a functional bit made of antler and characteristic wear in the teeth. Researchers reconstructed the bit, using a simple rawhide mouthpiece, and found it worked out well. The horse and bit have been dated to about 4000 BC, over a thousand years before the invention of the wheel. Moreover, the ritualistic nature of the burial suggested that by this point, the horse had already risen to a status of great esteem; skeletal analysis showed it to have good conformation for riding, being about the same size as breeds like the Connemara of Ireland.
This is more or less a paraphrasing of Philip Sidnell's introduction to his book Warhorse: Cavalry in Ancient Warfare, and in it he cites Stephen Budiansky, The Nature of Horses and A. Azzaroli, An Early History of Horsemanship .