Amazing stuff! We owe horses so much! Without horses, we might still be very primitive people!
"... Horse power was a critical development in human society as it significantly sped up ancient people’s ability to communicate and trade. Riding on horse back remained the fastest means of transportation until the mechanical engine was invented in the 20th century. ..."
"... The research team gathered an extensive collection of horse archaeological remains spanning the Eurasian continent. They combined radiocarbon dating with ancient DNA sequencing to characterize a comprehensive genome time-series providing fine-grained resolution into the genetic transformations coinciding with the emergence of equestrianism. ...
The remarkable alignment of all three lines of evidence around ~4,200 years ago strongly suggests that domestic horses were produced in sufficiently large numbers to sustain a growing demand across the continent only then, and not earlier. Therefore, the date of ~4,200 years ago marks the true onset of horse-based mobility as we recognize it. ..."
The research team scrutinized their data for three indicators of horse husbandry. First, they traced when the progenitors of modern domestic horses began to spread outside their native domestication homeland. Next, they reconstructed the horse demography all along the third millennium BCE to precisely date the earliest signs of breeding and large-scale production of horses. Last, they uncovered evidence of significant shifts in the horse reproductive lifespan, indicating deliberate manipulation of animal reproduction by early breeders.
From the abstract:
"Horses revolutionized human history with fast mobility. However, the timeline between their domestication and widespread integration as a means of transportation remains contentious. Here we assemble a large collection of 475 ancient horse genomes to assess the period when these animals were first reshaped by human agency in Eurasia. We find that reproductive control of the modern domestic lineage emerged ~2,200 BCE (Before Common Era), through close kin mating and shortened generation times. Reproductive control emerged following a severe domestication bottleneck starting no earlier than ~2,700 BCE, and coincided with a sudden expansion across Eurasia that ultimately resulted in the replacement of nearly every local horse lineage. This expansion marked the rise of widespread horse-based mobility in human history, which refutes the commonly-held narrative of large horse herds accompanying the massive migration of steppe peoples across Europe ~3,000 BCE and earlier. Finally, we detect significantly shortened generation times at Botai ~3,500 BCE, a settlement from Central Asia associated with corrals and a subsistence economy centered on horses. This supports local horse husbandry before the rise of modern domestic bloodlines."
The rise of horse power ~4,200 years ago (original press release) An international research team sequenced the genomes of hundreds of horse archaeological remains to track the historical rise of horse-based mobility around 4200 years ago in the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
The emergence of improved breeding techniques at the time considerably enhanced the yearly capacity of horse production, which helped spreading domestic horses like a wildfire across the whole Eurasian continent.
The massive human migrations that spread Indo-European languages outside the steppes around 5,000 years ago were not mediated by horses, contrarily to what was previously thought.
Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia (no public access)
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