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I found this on the International Herald Tribune e-mail edition today and
thought the list members might enjoy reading it even though it's OT.
Linda in Guben
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At digs in Kazakhstan, signs of the early horse
By John Noble Wilford The New York Times
Thursday, March 5, 2009
It's a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the equestrian journey to the
Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear
to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses - around
3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists say the discovery may revise thinking about the
development of some pre-agricultural Eurasian societies and put an earlier date
to their dispersal into Europe and elsewhere. These migrations are believed to
have been associated with horse domestication and the spread of Indo-European
languages.
At the very least, on the first Saturday in May the winning
thoroughbred should be toasted not with a julep but a taste of koumiss, the
fermented mare's milk favored by equestrians in Central Asia. It's an acquired
taste, so keep bourbon on hand just in case.
Evidence for the earlier date for equine domestication was set
to be described Friday in the journal Science by an international team of
archaeologists. The report's lead author is Alan Outram of the University of
Exeter in England.
The archaeologists wrote of uncovering ample horse bones and
artifacts from which they derived "three independent lines of evidence
demonstrating domestication" of horses by the semisedentary Botai culture,
which occupied sites in northern Kazakhstan for six centuries, beginning at
about 3600 B.C.
The shape and size of the skeletons from four sites were
analyzed and compared with bones of wild horses in the region from the same
time, with domestic horses from the Bronze Age, centuries later, and with
Mongolian domestic horses. The researchers said the Botai animals were
"appreciably more slender" than robust wild horses and resembled domestic
horses more closely.
Outram said in an interview that it was not clear from the
research if the breeding of the tamed Botai horses had by then led to the
origin of a genetically distinct new species. But their physical attributes
were strikingly different, he added, and this made the animals more useful to
the people as meat, milk sources and beasts of burden and locomotion.
The second pieces of evidence were the marks on the horses'
teeth and damage to skeletal tissue in the mouths. The researchers said this
represented the wear of mouthpieces - or bits - inserted for harnessing with a
bridle or similar restraint to control working animals.
Other archaeologists, digging at other sites, have detected
similar traces of what they said was bit wear, but this has been disputed as
evidence of domestication. Outram said that some of the damage to the Botai
teeth and jaw bones could only have been caused by bit wear.
Botai pottery yielded the third strands of evidence. Embedded
in the clay pots were residues of carcass fat and fatty acids that "very
likely" came from mare's milk, the researchers said. This "confirms that at
least some of the mares of Botai were domesticated," they concluded.
Just when and where domestication of horses first occurred has
long puzzled archaeologists. Most of their investigations have concentrated on
the steppes of Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, where wild horses were abundant
for thousands of years, and burials included the skeletons of prized stallions
and early chariots.
In his authoritative book "The Horse, the Wheel and Languages,"
David Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, said
in 2007 that some of the best evidence put the beginning of horse domestication
in the region at about 2500 B.C.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/05/asia/horses.php
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