Domestication of the horse

[7] Genetic evidence indicates that domestication of the modern horse's ancestors likely occurred in an area known as the Volga–Don, in the Pontic–Caspian steppe region of eastern Europe, around 2200 BCE.

[1] On the other hand, measurable changes in size and increases in variability associated with domestication occurred later, about 2500–2000 BCE, as seen in horse remains found at the site of Csepel-Haros in Hungary, a settlement of the Bell Beaker culture.

[16] The horses of the Ice Age were hunted for meat in Europe and across the Eurasian steppes and in North America by early modern humans.

Others were linked to cognitive function and most likely were critical to the taming of the horse, including social behavior, learning capabilities, fear response, and agreeableness.

[26][27] The low present diversity may be partially explained by the popularity of Arabian and Turkoman studs, especially the three foundation stallions of the Thoroughbred breed.

Evidence suggested that "a massive genomic turnover" had occurred along with the domestication of horses and large-scale human population expansion in the Early Bronze Age.

The genetic lineage that leads to modern domestic horses shows evidence of strong selection for locomotor and behavioural adaptations.

The least ancient, but most persuasive, evidence of domestication comes from sites where horse leg bones and skulls, probably originally attached to hides, were interred with the remains of chariots in at least 16 graves of the Sintashta and Petrovka cultures.

All of the dated chariot graves contained wheel impressions, horse bones, weapons (arrow and javelin points, axes, daggers, or stone mace-heads), human skeletal remains, and cheekpieces.

Some researchers do not consider an animal to be "domesticated" until it exhibits physical changes consistent with selective breeding, or at least having been born and raised entirely in captivity.

However, more recently there have been skeletal remains found at a site in Kazakhstan which display the smaller, more slender limbs characteristic of corralled animals, dated to 3500 BCE.

[3][4] The presence of bit wear is an indicator that a horse was ridden or driven, and the earliest of such evidence from a site in Kazakhstan dates to 3500 BCE.

[41][48] The Botai culture premolars are the earliest reported multiple examples of this dental pathology in any archaeological site, and preceded any skeletal change indicators by 1,000 years.

While wear facets more than 3 mm deep were discovered on the lower second premolars of a single stallion from Dereivka in Ukraine, an Eneolithic settlement dated about 4000 BCE,[48] dental material from one of the worn teeth later produced a radiocarbon date of 700–200 BCE, indicating that this stallion was actually deposited in a pit dug into the older Eneolithic site during the Iron Age.

Although images of horses appear as early as the Upper Paleolithic period in places such as the caves of Lascaux, France, suggesting that wild horses lived in regions outside of the Eurasian steppes before domestication and may have even been hunted by early humans, concentration of remains suggests animals being deliberately captured and contained, an indicator of domestication, at least for food, if not necessarily use as a working animal.

Around 3500–3000 BCE, horse bones began to appear more frequently in archaeological sites beyond their center of distribution in the Eurasian steppes and were seen in central Europe, the middle and lower Danube valley, and the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia.

[39][51][52] European wild horses were hunted for up to 10% of the animal bones in a handful of Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements scattered across Spain, France, and the marshlands of northern Germany, but in many other parts of Europe, including Greece, the Balkans, the British Isles, and much of central Europe, horse bones do not occur or occur very rarely in Mesolithic, Neolithic or Chalcolithic sites.

[51][53][54] Horse bones were rare or absent in Neolithic and Chalcolithic kitchen garbage in western Turkey, Mesopotamia, most of Iran, South and Central Asia, and much of Europe.

[1]: 291 Later, images of horses, identified by their short ears, flowing manes, and tails that bushed out at the dock, began to appear in artistic media in Mesopotamia during the Akkadian period, 2300–2100 BCE.

[60] Skeletal evidence from sites in Shirenzigou and Xigou in eastern Xinjiang indicate that by the fourth century BCE both horseback riding and mounted archery were practiced along China’s northwest frontier.

[61] In 2008, archaeologists announced the discovery of rock art in Somalia's northern Dhambalin region, which the researchers suggest is one of the earliest known depictions of a hunter on horseback.

[65] Settlements in the steppes contemporary with Suvorovo, such as Sredni Stog II and Dereivka on the Dnieper River, contained 12–52% horse bones.

After this episode of contact and trade, but still during the period 4200–4000 BCE, about 600 agricultural towns in the Balkans and the lower Danube valley, some of which had been occupied for 2000 years, were abandoned.

Environmental deterioration, ecological degradation from millennia of farming, and the exhaustion of easily mined oxide copper ores also are cited as causal factors.

[1][68] Perforated antler objects discovered at Derievka (mistakenly, Dereivka) and other sites contemporary with Suvorovo have been identified as cheekpieces or psalia for horse bits.

[citation needed] At S'yezzhe, a contemporary cemetery of the Samara culture, parts of two horses were placed above a group of human graves.

Horse images carved from bone were placed in the above-ground ochre deposit at S’yezzhe and occurred at several other sites of the same period in the middle and lower Volga region.

[72] While the environmental conditions for equine survival were somewhat more favorable in Eurasia than in the Americas, the same stressors that led to extinction for the mammoth had an effect upon horse populations.

It has been noted that traditional peoples worldwide (both hunter-gatherers and horticulturists) routinely tame individuals from wild species, typically by hand-rearing infants whose parents have been killed, and these animals are not necessarily "domesticated."

Herodotus' description of the Sigynnae, a steppe people who bred horses too small to ride but extremely efficient at drawing chariots, illustrates this stage.