The “last wild horse” descends from tamed horses of the Kazakh steppe

On the grasslands of northern Kazakhstan, archaeologists found the remains of the Botai culture, people who lived around 3700–3100 BC. Their settlements contained enormous numbers of horse bones, corral-like enclosures and thick layers of horse dung.

Early horse-keepers

Several clues suggest Botai people did more than hunt horses:

• wear on horse teeth of a kind associated with bits, suggesting the animals were bridled;
• traces in pottery that some researchers identified as mare’s milk, a striking link to kumys, fermented mare’s milk, still popular in Kazakhstan today. That finding has since been questioned.

For years, Botai was presented as the place where horses were first domesticated.

The genetic twist

In 2018, a team sequenced ancient genomes from Botai horses. They expected to find the ancestors of modern domestic horses. Instead they found that Botai horses were mainly ancestors of Przewalski’s horse: the stocky, dun-coloured horse of the Mongolian steppe, famous as the last truly wild horse on Earth. Botai horses contributed only around 2.7% of the ancestry of today’s domestic horses.

That suggests two things:

1. Przewalski’s horses are probably feral, descendants of horses that people once managed, not an untouched wild line.
2. Today’s domestic horses were mostly domesticated somewhere else, later.

Kazakhstan still has one of the strongest horse cultures in the world: horse meat dishes, kumys and horseback games. The steppe’s connection to horses turns out to be even older than that.