The ancestor of all modern horses made its first appearance by 4200 years ago in the western Eurasian steppe, according to a study from last year. ScienceMagArchives
About 4200 years ago, a few herders on the western Eurasian steppe got a brand-new mount. They were experienced at herding wild horses for food, but their new steeds had a calmer disposition and a stronger back, making the horses easier to train and ride, perhaps for the first time. The new model galloped across Eurasia within a few centuries, triggering major shifts in Bronze Age human cultures.
The first evidence of horse domestication comes earlier, from Kazakhstan, where herders of the Botai culture corralled mares for meat and perhaps milk about 5500 years ago. Researchers haven’t proved the Botai horses, whose teeth show wear likely from bits, were actually ridden, but archaeologists assumed for years that they were ancestral to modern horses.
But starting by about 4200 years ago, that diversity began to disappear. The genetic profile of one type of horse, closely related to modern horses, began to spread rapidly across Eurasia, replacing the others. By 4000 years ago, the new horse dominated a region from central Anatolia to central Russia, where people of the Sintashta culture buried horses with the earliest spoked wheels and chariots in mounds called kurgans. By 3000 years ago, the replacement was complete.
Those early cousins came from three sites in a center of horse domestication near the lower Volga and Don rivers in the northern Caucasus, which is now southern Russia . Here, pastoralist cultures of the time herded goats, sheep, cattle, and perhaps horses in the dry, open steppe, says archaeologist Sabine Reinhold of the German Archaeological Institute , a co-author.
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