throughout the history of Finland. Linguistic analysis suggest that horse was in use in Finland in the bronze age, but the earliest archaeological evidence of horses existing in what today is Finland dates to the Finnish Middle Iron Age (400–800 CE). The Finnhorse and its progenitors later became an indispensable asset for military forces from the region of Finland during the times of Swedish and Russian rule, and since independence as well. In addition to functionality as military and working horses, the Finnhorse has also been bred for speed in harness racing, and it can be argued that this sport was the main factor in the survival of the breed after its numbers crashed during the later half of the 20th century, from approximately 400,000 animals in the 1950s to 14,000 in the 1980s. In the 21st century, the numbers of the breed have stabilised at approximately 20,000 animals. Early history Although multiple hypotheses exist on the origins of the horse in Finland, an indigenous wild horse origin is thought improbable, as significant numbers of domesticated horses were imported from earliest times. The Finnhorse is most likely descended from a northern European domestic horse. One theory suggests that horses arrived from the west, brought to what today is western Finland by the Vikings during the Viking Age, circa 800–1050 CE. These Viking horses would have been of northern European ancestry. The other main theory suggests that non-Viking peoples, who migrated into Finland from the southeast and south, brought with them horses of Mongolian origin that had been further developed in the Urals and Volga River regions. Both theories have merit, as there were two distinct horse types in the eastern and western regions of Finland that remained distinct from one another until at least the middle of the 19th century. The eastern origin of the breed was first proposed by archaeologist Johannes Reinhold Aspelin, who published Suomalaisen hevosen kotoperäisyydestä ("On the Nativity of the Finnish horse") in 1886–1887. Aspelin proposed that Finnish horses descended from an animal that had accompanied the migration of Finnic peoples from the Volga region and middle Russia to the shores of the Gulf of Finland. A similar idea was suggested over a hundred years earlier by natural historian Pehr Adrian Gadd, and this theory has continued to receive support into modern times. Ludvig Fabritius considered the proposed prototype a side branch of a "Tartarian" breed,