The horse, its four slender legs accomplishing astonishing feats of strength and endurance, has provided humans with far more than transportation from point A to point B.
It has allowed us to travel long distances for trade, carry heavy loads, move our societies around more freely and, inevitably, conduct more efficient warfare. Arguably the most important domesticated animal, the horse also has provided humans with meat and milk.
Now we have a better idea of when this complex and vital human-horse relationship began.
New evidence, including more slender leg bones, bit-pitted teeth and mares milk residue in pottery, indicate that the horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia at least 5,500 years ago, more than 1,000 years earlier than previously believed and 2,000 years before it appeared in Europe.
"To me, the domestication of the horse was a seminal event in human history," said archaeologist Sandra L. Olsen of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, a co-author of the paper appearing today in the journal Science. "All the major empire builders, like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, would have been nothing without horses."
It was believed that the oldest evidence of domestication was found at the village of Dereivka in Ukraine, dating to about 2000 BC. But Olsen and some other researchers argued that domestication occurred much earlier among members of the Botai culture on the steppes of what is now northern Kazakhstan.
She and her colleagues found a variety of evidence suggesting domestication, including a horse corral, the use of horse manure in roofing materials and the widespread use of rawhide tools such as lassos, which are generally associated with horse-dependent cultures.
That evidence has been controversial, with critics suggesting that it may only represent exploitation of feral horses.
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 "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!"
