Stone Age · 4th millennium BC · Eurasian steppe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia
Horse domestication in Eurasia began centuries earlier than thought, study argues
A Science Advances study argues that people rode, milked and managed horses in the 4th millennium BC, long before the spread of the DOM2 lineage around 2200 BC.
Peer-reviewed paper
Eurasian steppe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia People across Eurasia were riding, managing and trading horses in the 4th millennium BC, several centuries before the date often given for full horse domestication, according to a new study published in Science Advances. The team, co-led by Professor Volker Heyd, combined archaeology, ancient DNA and studies of animal bones. They argue that domestication was a slow process spread over many generations and did not begin with one sudden genetic shift.
The date the study challenges is around 2200 to 2100 BC. That window matches the spread of horses from a genetic group called DOM2. Geneticists sort horses into lineages of this kind by shared ancestry in their DNA, and DOM2 is the lineage linked to modern domestic horses. DOM2 horses carried traits linked to endurance and calmer behaviour around humans, and they later spread across Europe, Anatolia, the Near East and Central Asia. Because of that expansion, many researchers have treated it as the beginning of domestication.
Several lineages in human hands
The new study argues that horses from several lineages were already part of human life well before 2200 BC: DOM1, DOM2 and a third group that the authors propose calling DOM3. According to the researchers, people milked these horses, rode them, and used them in rituals and in their food systems. DOM3 is a proposal, and the news report on the study does not say how it differs from the other two groups.
The team points to the Yamnaya as early horse riders. The Yamnaya were steppe groups who lived between about 3200 and 2600 BC, and are best known from burials under earth mounds on the steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The researchers think these communities probably rode DOM2 horses, the same lineage that later became dominant. The report does not set out which finds support the riding claim.
Speed across the steppe
Around 3500 to 3000 BC, steppe groups expanded both east and west while using wheeled transport. Cattle pulled the early wagons. The study's argument is that horses added speed: a rider could cover in hours a distance that took a wagon days, and this changed travel, communication and movement across large regions.
The researchers also connect horse mobility with the spread of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language from which many languages now spoken across Europe and Asia developed. In their view, steppe groups carried these languages with them as they moved into new areas. Horses later became central to trade, warfare and migration, and mounted peoples such as the Huns, Avars, Magyars and Mongols depended heavily on them.
Heyd said the long gap between early horse use and the later genetic changes alters how scholars view domestication. In his account, the process took shape over many centuries, through repeated contact between people and horses, breeding, and selection for useful traits.
The study also notes that no truly wild horses survive today. Even Przewalski's horse, once considered the last wild horse, descends from early domesticated populations.
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