Equus caballus, Horse: Domestication
Domestic species such as dogs, cattle, sheep, and goats were established several thousand years before the horse was domesticated.
Horse domestication made a profound impact on history of the mankind. It is associated with the spread of Indo-European languages and culture, development of new technologies (such as bronze metallurgy), enhanced mobility, specialized forms of warfare, and commerce.
Before horses were found to be useful as working animals, they were hunted for meat and hides. Horse remains become increasingly common in archeological sites of the Eurasian grassland steppe dating from about 6,000 years ago.
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Archeological data obtained recently suggest that earliest horse domestication event occurred in the Eneolithic Botai Culture, located in what is now Northern Kazakhstan from 5700 to 5100 years ago.
Botai culture, developed in a region remote from the locus of ruminant domestication in the "Fertile Crescent" and in an area seemingly devoid of domestic ruminants, relied heavily on hunting of wild horses for its subsistence. It is logical to expect that once in a while some captured animals were retained in confines of the settlements until used for food and/of for clothes.
Three lines of evidence were presented to bolster the theory that Botai people were the world's first horse tamers:
- The bones of the Botai horses indicate that in their morphology they are very close to the Bronze Age domestic horses from Kent and modern Mongolian domestic horses and, in the same time, differ significantly from the Paleolithic wild horses lived in geographically close region of Southern Siberia. The domestic populations are clearly more slender than their wild counterparts.
- The clearly bitted (showing the characteristic dental wear from bitting and bridling) fossil specimen was dated by accelerator mass spectrometry to about 4658+-33 years before the present. Researchers found that five out of 15 Botai horse skulls they studied were scarred with the markings, which indicates that at least some Botai horses were harnessed and ridden.
- Traces of horse milk found on Botai pottery shards indicate that the Botai people practiced horse milking, which further confirms some degree of horse domestication.
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Archeological and genetic data indicate that, initially, wild horses were captured over a large geographic area and used for nutrition and transport and horse domestication occurred differently from that of other domestic animals where domestic populations were founded with relatively few individuals selected for behavioral characteristics, such as docility. The diversity of matrilines observed in modern horses suggests utilization of wild mares from a large number of populations as founders of the domestic horse. The sex bias is consistent with breeding practices in which a single stud is used for mating with 15 to 20 or more females. Wide-spread horse utilization occurred initially not due to expansion from a limited number of domestication centers and selective breeding, but rather through the transfer of technology for capturing, taming, and rearing wild caught animals.
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Horse harnessing, carriages
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| Two horse hitch | Two horse hitch |
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| Four horse hitch | Six horse hitch |
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