WAshington — The horse transformed human history — and now scientists have a clearer idea of when humans began transforming the horse.
About 4,200 years ago, a specific lineage of horses quickly became dominant across Eurasia, suggesting that was when humans began spreading domesticated horses across the world, according to research. published Thursday in the journal Nature.
There was something special about this horse: He had a genetic mutation that changed the shape of his back, probably making him easier to ride.
“In the past, there were many different lineages of horses,” said Pablo Librado, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and co-author of the new study. This genetic diversity was evident in ancient DNA samples that researchers analyzed at archaeological sites across Eurasia dating back 50,000 years.
But analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes showed a remarkable change about 4,200 years ago.
It was then that a specific lineage that first emerged in what is known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a region of plains stretching from what is now northeastern Bulgaria through Ukraine and southern Russia, began to emerge. throughout Eurasia and quickly replaced other lineages. Within three hundred years, horses in Spain were similar to those in Russia.
“We saw this genetic type spreading across almost all of Eurasia – clearly this type of horse that was local became global very quickly,” said co-author Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics in Toulouse, on France.
Researchers believe this change occurred because a Bronze Age people called Sintashta domesticated their local horse and began using these animals to help them dramatically expand their territory.
Domesticating wild horses on the Eurasian plains was a process, not a one-time event, scientists say.
Archaeologists have already found evidence of people consuming horse milk in dental remains dating back to around 5,500 years ago, and the first evidence of horse riding dates back to around 5,000 years ago. But it was the Sintashta who spread the specific horses they domesticated across Eurasia, the new study suggests.
Researchers believe that the earliest ancestors of horses appeared in North America and then crossed the Bering Strait into Asia about a million years ago. They flourished in Asia but became extinct in the Americas.
People domesticated other animals thousands of years before horses – including dogs, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep. But the new research shows that the decline in genetic diversity associated with domestication happened much more quickly in horses.
“Humans changed the horse genome incredibly quickly, perhaps because we already had experience dealing with animals,” said Laurent Frantz, who studies the genetics of ancient creatures at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was not involved in the study.
“This shows the special place of horses in human societies.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
