Home of modern house horses

The origin of modern domesticated horses is a controversial and complex issue, dominated by формулы в Excel two sciences: genetics and archaeology. For a long time, scientists could not determine the exact region of the appearance of horses. Many different regions were considered to be their homeland: from the territory of modern Portugal to Mongolia.

Recently, a large international team of researchers published an article in Nature magazine analyzing more than two hundred ancient horse genomes and tried at last to answer the question, "Where did the ancestors of modern domestic horses first appear?"

The authors of the article claim that the true homeland of all modern domestic horses is the lower reaches of the Don and Volga - the area around modern-day Astrakhan Oblast and western Kazakhstan.

Dmitry Ravcheev, bioinformatician, researcher of MicroGen Biotech explained exactly how scientists came to such conclusions, and also found out who are extinct European tarpans and miraculously preserved Przewalski`s horses for modern horses.

Horses have been with us for only 5 thousand years, while dogs and cows were domesticated much earlier, 15 and 10 thousand years ago. However, in such a relatively short period of time, horses have managed to dramatically change our lives, increasing the mobility of human communities and changing the balance of military power.

British mathematician, biologist, and science popularizer Jacob Bronowski, in his book and series The Rise of Mankind, compares the domestication of the horse to the invention of the tank - in the sense that unlike cattle, which are essential in agriculture, the horse was primarily of military value to man. But in spite of this, the question of the origin of domestic horses still has a lot of gaps.

At the moment, Central Asia (and specifically the settlement of Botai in Northern Kazakhstan, the birthplace of Botai culture), various settlements on the Iberian Peninsula and in Anatolia simultaneously claim to be the home of the first domestic horses.

Whether horses were domesticated once or repeatedly is unknown. Otherwise, it is difficult for scientists to say from whom modern horses originated. Whether it was one domesticated population or a mixture of descendants of different horses domesticated at different times and places.

Another stumbling block is the closest ancestor. Now it is difficult to say whether it was a tarpan, which was very similar to the modern horse and lived in the forests and steppes of Europe until the beginning of the 20th century or Przewalski's horse, which survived to our days, or maybe another kind of wild horse, for example, the Lena horse that lived in the northeast of Siberia.

The group of scientists analyzed the genomes of the record-breaking number of ancient horses - 264 animals that lived from 50,000 to 200 years BC on the Iberian Peninsula, in Asia Minor and Central Asia, and in the steppes of western Eurasia. The work also included studies of the genomes of ten modern and nine ancient horses.

What did they find out?

First, it turned out that all modern domesticated horses came from the same group of domesticated horses, i.e., they were closely related to one another.

Second, ancient domesticated horses, which became extinct some 4,200 years ago, and also wild horses from Western Eurasia, which had lived until the beginning of the third millennium BC, appeared to be closely related to modern domestic horses.

Third, the position of horses from the Botai* settlement, which until now had been considered the oldest representatives of domestic horses in the world, was clarified.

The oldest domesticated horses were indeed found there, but they turned out to be only distant relatives for the modern horses. At the same time, the Botai horses turned out to be close relatives of Przhevalsky's horse. So Przhevalsky's horse is the ancestor of a domesticated horse, but not the modern horse, but an ancient one, whose descendants have not survived to this day.

The most distant relative of all known modern domesticated horses was the Lena horse found in the permafrost of Yakutia.

Scientists also reconstructed the history of the domesticated horse based on studies of the genomes and the degree of relatedness of ancient horses that lived at different times in different parts of Eurasia. Thus, the horse was domesticated in Western Eurasia, presumably in the lower reaches of the Volga and Don Rivers, during the period 3500-2600 years B.C. The people who did that were most likely representatives of the Yamnaya culture, which existed at the end of the Copper Age - beginning of the Bronze Age in the south of the East European Plain.

Between 2200 and 2000 B.C. horses spread westward thanks to man: Bohemia (west of modern Bohemia), Asia Minor and the lower Danube. 1500-1000 years BC domestic horses appeared in Western Europe and Mongolia.