Horses were first domesticated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the North Caucasus, before conquering the rest of Eurasia in several centuries. This is the result of an extensive study based on, inter alia, genetic analysis.
Thanks to the work of 162 scientists – archaeologists, palaeontologists, linguists and geneticists – it was possible to unravel the mystery of horse domestication. This is what the authors of the new publication, which appeared in the “Nature” magazine, say, among them – scientists from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Władysław Szafer Institute of Botany (Polish Academy of Sciences), the Institute of Archeology and Ethnology (PAS) in Cracow and the Institute of Archeology of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
A few years ago, Ludovic Orlando’s team from the French National Center for Scientific Research found the alleged oldest traces of domesticated horses at the Botai site in Central Asia.
However, according to DNA research, the 5,500-year-old remains did not belong to the ancestors of today’s horses.
Other similar discoveries in Anatolia, Siberia and the Iberian Peninsula also proved to be false.
Therefore, the researchers decided to extend the search to all of Eurasia, analyzing the genes of 273 horses that lived between 50,000 and 200 BC.