Next time you put on a pair of pants, thank the Horse Goddess.

According to current evidence, pants were invented by those same horse-riding, pot-smoking, milk-drinking Indo-European pastoralists who, starting about 6000 years ago, spread out in all directions from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to take over the known world: our linguistic ancestors.

Why, one might wonder, did they invent pants?

Easily told: because they were also the first to ride horses.

Did you ever try riding a horse while wearing a kilt?

Every word's a story.

In their 6000-year history, the lower, bifurcated garment has gone by many names, and pants are only the youngest.

The word, of course, is short for pantaloons, named for a stock character of 17th-century Italian comedy whose signature form of dress they were. Another version would have it that "pantaloons" was a nickname for Venetians, whose patron saint was St. Pantalone. Your call.

Older than pants were trousers, derived from the Gaelic triubhas. The Scots word trews remains more faithful to the original Celtic pronunciation than the longer, extended Southron version, which would seems to have acquired its extra syllable under the influence of drawers, something you draw on.

Older yet, the tunic-ed and toga-ed Romans were horrified to discover the barbarous inhabitants of Gallia Comata (“long-haired Gaul”) wearing leg-coverings that they called braccae. Germans wore them too—you know, those hairy barbarians are all alike—and called them by the same name, whence English breeches, and the Americanized britches. (Once again, Scots breeks remains faithful to the old Celtic pronunciation.) To the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches, they were bréc, the plural of bróc, “leg covering.”

Braccae take us back in time about as far as we can go. The word exists in both Celtic and Germanic stocks, so in all likelihood derive, at the very least, from the time of the common tongue from which both language stocks derive: possibly 3500-3000 BCE.

What the original horse-riding, pot-smoking, milk-drinking pastoralists called them on the prairies of eastern Europe 6000 years ago, we don't know.

They must have had a name for them, though. After all, they invented them.

It's interesting that, throughout their linguistic history, though used as a singular noun, pants/trousers/britches have retained their anomalous plural form. (“A pair of pants,” we still say.)

This fact tells its own story, and points to their origin as a pair of leggings, like those worn by Iceman Ötzi 4500 years ago.

The recent discovery of, at some 3300 years, the oldest-known pair of trousers on the body of a naturally-mummified “Tocharian” warrior in China's Tarim basin, with their carefully-reinforced crotch and inner thighs, demonstrates the cultural sophistication of those long-haired, milk-drinking, pot-smoking warriors who tamed the horse and took over the world.

Milk, weed, trousers.

Thanks be to the Mare-headed Lady, Mother of Foals, for all the gifts she gives us.