Horse collar of the Oseberg ship burial). The problem with a breastcollar harness was that the actual shafts of the cart, chariot, or other vehicle are attached to a surcingle around the barrel of the horse. The breastplate primarily kept the surcingle from slipping back, not as the primary pushing object. This results in the horse literally pulling the load, a less efficient use of the animal. The modern breastcollar has traces which transfer the pull directly from the breastcollar, but a horse collar still is more effective for pulling heavy loads. After the breastcollar harness, the next and final evolutionary stage
Matroid girth Matroid girth In matroid theory, a mathematical discipline, the girth of a matroid is the size of its smallest circuit or dependent set. The cogirth of a matroid is the girth of its dual matroid. Matroid girth generalizes the notion of the shortest cycle in a graph, the edge connectivity of a graph, Hall sets in bipartite graphs, even sets in families of sets, and general position of point sets. It is hard to compute, but fixed-parameter tractable for linear matroids when parameterized both by the matroid rank and the field size of a linear representation. The "girth" terminology generalizes