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In Central Asia, 3500 BC, five and a half thousand years ago, lived sedentary hunter-gatherers who specialised in the hunting of horses. For centuries, generation after generation lived on almost nothing but horse meat. It’s also possible that they domesticated horses here, keeping them in corrals in their villages, for their milk and meat. They might even have ridden these horses and used them for hunting the wild horse populations, riding on their backs with spears and bows and arrows in hand. If so, this would be an independent horse domestication process from that which led to our domesticated horses today. So who were these people? Where did they come from and how did they live? What is the evidence that they managed and domesticated horses? And what ultimately happened to them? This is the story of the incredible horse hunters of prehistoric Central Asia, the Botai culture.
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Sources
The Oxford Handbook of the Archeology of Hunter-Gatherers: amzn.to/4f72WWz
Peter de Barros Damgaard et al. ,The first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe expansions into Asia.Science360,eaar7711(2018)
Jeong, C. et al. The genetic history of admixture across inner Eurasia (2019)
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Librado, P., Tressières, G., Chauvey, L. et al. Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia. Nature (2024)
Alan K. Outram, Horse domestication as a multi-centered, multi-stage process: Botai and the role of specialized Eneolithic horse pastoralism in the development of human-equine relationships (2023)
Peter de Barros Damgaard et al. ,The first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe expansions into Asia (2018)
Jeong, C., Balanovsky, O., Lukianova, E. et al. The genetic history of admixture across inner Eurasia. (2019)
Zhang, F., Ning, C., Scott, A. et al. The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies. (2021)
Fages et al., Tracking Five Millennia of Horse Management with Extensive Ancient Genome Time Series (2019)
Motuzaite Matuzeviciute, G., Lightfoot, E., Liu, X. et al. Archaeobotanical investigations at the earliest horse herder site of Botai in Kazakhstan (2019)
Taylor, W.T.T., Barrón-Ortiz, C.I. Rethinking the evidence for early horse domestication at Botai. (2021)
Librado, P., Khan, N., Fages, A. et al. The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes. Nature 598, 634-640 (2021)
Librado, P., Tressières, G., Chauvey, L. et al. Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia. Nature (2024)
Charleen Gaunitz et al. ,Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski’s horses.(2018)
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Video Chapters
00:00 The Botai Culture
01:48 MyHeritage
03:16 Where did they come from?
05:15 Botai settlements
10:15 Horse domestication evidence
16:40 Ancient horse DNA evidence
21:46 The Late 4th Millennium BC World