Kristina Killgrove is an archaeologist with specialties in ancient human skeletons and science communication. Her academic research has appeared in numerous scientific journals, while her news stories and essays have been published in venues such as Forbes, Mental Floss and Smithsonian.
Humans domesticated horses 1,000 years later than previously thought, first for access to their meat and milk and then for their transportation capabilities, a new study of ancient horse DNA suggests.
But a new analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes refutes the idea that large horse herds accompanied the migration of people across Europe thousands of years ago. In a study published Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of researchers identified distinct changes in the genetics of domesticated horses that point instead to a date around 2200 B.C., a millennium later than was previously assumed.
The genetic study also showed that a new bloodline — which matches that of modern domesticated horses — arose around 2200 B.C., corresponding well with archaeological evidence of horse imagery in Mesopotamia and chariot burials in the Ural Mountains. "It seems that the first domestication was motivated by accessing meat and milk in some Central Asian settled hunter-gathering group," study co-author Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, told Live Science in an email. But these people, who lived in what is now Kazakhstan, were not using horses for transport.
William Taylor, an archaeozoologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that this research shows"pretty conclusively that while the Yamnaya and other early cultures of the western steppes may have had a relationship with wild horses, they had little to do with the first domestication of the horse." The new study's genetic model"converges with other lines of direct evidence quite neatly," Taylor said.
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