Did the Botai of Kazakhstan ride the first domestic horses?
Five thousand years ago, people on the Kazakh steppe built horse corrals, and archaeologists have been arguing ever since over what that proves.
▶ Start the storyNot the ancestors of our horses, and whether they truly domesticated horses at all is still argued. The Botai look like horse people, but the horses they kept do not seem to be the ancestors of today's domestic horses. The Botai culture, from about 3700 to 3100 BC, was named after the settlement of Botai in northern Kazakhstan. These people moved from nomadic hunting and gathering to a settled life with a diet that relied heavily on horse meat.
The remains made archaeologists excited. Enormous amounts of horse bones were found in and around the settlements, along with -like enclosures and large amounts of horse dung, which suggested that the Botai kept horses or even domesticated them. Early discoveries also pointed to -related tooth wear and horse milking. Evidence reported in 2009, pottery containing mare's milk and bones that looked bred, made a stronger case for domestic horses by about 3,500 BC, close to 1,000 years earlier than the previous consensus.
Then the picture got complicated. More recent studies of suggest the Botai did not consume dairy, which weakens the milking evidence. Genetic work showed the Botai horses were not the ancestors of the common modern horse: they were primarily ancestors of Przewalski's horses and contributed only 2.7 percent ancestry to modern domestic horses. The geneticists who showed this still argued the Botai horses were domesticated, but other researchers argue that Botai findings reflect intensive exploitation of wild horses, possibly with some management, but not full domestication.
Botai horses
- Kept in -like enclosures
- Mostly Przewalski-type ancestors
- Only 2.7% of modern ancestry
Modern domestic horses
- Source in the
- Around 2200 BCE, Volga-Don
- Spread rapidly across Eurasia
Recent genetic studies place the source of all modern domestic horses in the , around 2200 BCE in the Volga-Don region. From there the domestic lineage spread rapidly across Eurasia.
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Recap
The Botai kept horses intensively, but today's domestic horses come from a different source, and whether Botai was true domestication is disputed.
💡 A trick to remember it · Botai filled its corrals, but the horses we ride trotted in from the west.
Surprising fact · Modern domestic horses seem to come from the Volga-Don region around 2200 BCE, not from Botai.
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (14 claims) cites at least one of these.