Horses were domesticated 1,000 years earlier than thought, researchers say
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Our friend the horse was domesticated in Central Asia more than 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, researchers say. New evidence found in Kazakhstan -- including teeth that appear to have been damaged by riding bits and the residue of horse milk in pottery -- dates back 5,500 years and predates horses’ domestication in Europe by 2,000 years. The BBC reports:
Until now, the earliest evidence of horse riding was metal parts from harnesses dating from the Bronze Age. Writing in Science, a team from Exeter University, UK, suggested that [members of the Botai culture] in Kazakhstan rode their horses 1,000 years earlier.
The team found evidence including a horse corral and rawhide tools like lassos and hobbles that seemed to point to domestication. Still, critics argued that these items weren’t enough to prove that horses had been domesticated; it could, they said, simply mean that feral horses were being exploited by Botai villagers. Our colleague Thomas H. Maugh III explains:
But the new finds ‘make it fairly unambiguous that this early Botai site had domestication,’ said archaeologist Alan K. Outram of the University of Exeter in Britain, lead author of the paper. The fact that the Botai people were both milking and riding the horses, he said, indicates the development of ‘a full pastoral economy, which suggests that there are even earlier domesticated horses to be found.’ Archaeologist David W. Anthony of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., a leading expert on the domestication of horses, agreed in an e-mail message, calling the identification of mares milk residue in the pottery ‘a spectacular and brilliant advance.... If you are milking horses, they are not wild!’
The Botai village was occupied from about 3700 to 3100 BC and had about 1,000 people.
-- Lindsay Barnett