Horse and man: where and when the animals were once tamed – knowledge

Every relationship is good when it has a founding myth. So you can keep telling yourself how it all began and strengthen the connection. In the relationship between humans and horses, however, it is not only the fact that one of the partners shouldn’t care about such stories. Above all, there has been a lack of essential facts about where the two met a few millennia ago. This puzzle has now been solved, a group around Ludovic Orlando from the University of Toulouse announced in the specialist magazine Nature. According to this, today’s domestic horse comes from animals from the Pontokaspis region in the western part of the Eurasian steppe. Horses were domesticated there 4200 years ago, which then reached the entire area between the Atlantic and Mongolia within a few centuries.

The researchers are thus delivering one of the last pieces of the puzzle in an unusually complicated history of domestication. Because the animals tamed in the western Eurasian steppe were by no means the first horses that humans had made pets. 1300 years earlier, horses were tamed in the Botai culture in what is now Kazakhstan and used as a source of meat and milk as well as riding animals. For a long time, these animals were therefore considered the ancestors of today’s domestic horses. But wrongly, as Orlando and his colleagues discovered a few years ago. The line of Botai domestic horses died out before it could spread widely. The same happened to other domestic horse lines that had emerged in Siberia and on the Iberian Peninsula. Orlando once compared their relationship to today’s domestic horse with the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans.

A gene mutation strengthened the backs of the animals

In order to be able to identify the Pontocaspis as the region of origin of today’s horses, the researchers compared the genomes of more than 200 horses that had lived thousands of years ago and the genetic make-up of ten horses today. They benefited from the fact that animals in Anatolia, Europe, Central Asia and Siberia used to be genetically very different from one another. How quickly the domesticated horses spread from the west of the Eurasian steppe and displaced all other lines surprised the scientists. First the domesticated horses came to Central Asia, a little later to what is now Western Europe.

Two genetic changes, which the authors also describe, are likely to have contributed significantly to the rapid spread. One of the mutations resulted in a more stable back area. Presumably it was this genetic change that made it possible to use horses permanently as mounts. Even today horses need careful muscle training so that a rider does not cause them back pain. The other mutation made the animals less shy and more towards humans. This was important in order not to live in constant panic as a flight animal in captivity. The authors write that animals have quickly become popular means of transport and status symbols.

As Orlando and colleagues have shown in earlier studies, it took until the seventh century AD for a more elegant horse type to establish itself in Europe. In addition, the early breeders promoted the variety of colors in their animals. Perhaps the proverb arose at that time to warn today’s horse buyers against choosing an animal based on its coat color alone, because: “A good horse has no color”.

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