Published 21 October 2021 at 14.12
Home page. It has long been speculated that the Indo-Europeans, who conquered most of Europe and, among other things, gave us our languages, were the first to tame horses. This is now confirmed by a large international research team that used DNA analysis in their study.
Like the article p & aring; Facebook
It was on the Pontic-Caspian steppes of the North Caucasus that horses were first domesticated – and then conquered the rest of Eurasia within a few centuries.
It shows an international study led by paleogeneticist Ludovic Orlando at the French research organization CNRS.
The study has solved a riddle that researchers have been figuring out for decades, and it required 162 specialists in archeology, paleogenetics and linguistics from nearly 120 different research institutes.
A few years ago, Orlando's research team looked at Botai in Central Asia, which had provided the oldest archaeological evidence for domestic horses. But the DNA results were not correct; These horses that lived 5,500 years ago were not the ancestors of our modern domestic horses. p>
This prompted the researchers to expand their study to the whole of Eurasia. First, the genome of horses that lived between 50,000 and 200 years before our era was analyzed and then it was compared with the genome of modern domestic horses. It worked.
Although Eurasia was once populated by genetically distinct equine populations, a dramatic change occurred between the years 2000 and 2200 BC. Then a single genetic profile, formerly confined to the Pontic steppes (North Caucasus), began to spread beyond its native territory and replace all wild horse populations from the Atlantic to Mongolia within a few centuries. The genetic data also point to an explosive demographic that has no equivalent in the last 100,000 years.
The reason is that it was then, about 4,000 years ago, that humans took control of the horses' reproduction and began to breed them in large number.
The researchers found two striking differences between the genome (genome) of this horse and the genome of the populations it replaced: one is linked to a more docile behavior and the other indicates a stronger spine. This may be one of the reasons for the modern horse's success, the researchers believe.
The study also reveals that the horse spread throughout Asia at the same time as horse tanks and Indo-Iranian languages. However, the migration of Indo-European populations, from the steppes to Europe during the third millennium BC, cannot be due to horses, as their domestication and spread came only later. According to the researchers, this shows the importance of incorporating the history of animals when studying human migrations and encounters between cultures.