The international team of researchers, including Russian, has established that the horses were first domesticated on the territory of the modern Volga-Don region of Russia more than 4,200 years ago. The article of scientists is published in the magazine Nature, dedicated to the origin of domesticated horses.
The domestication of horses radically influenced the course of the history of mankind, significantly increasing the speed of the development of new territories by people and changing the appearance of agriculture and military art. However, where and when it happened, it remained unclear. Previously, scientists were discovered evidence of horses at the place of the village of Botay in Northern Kazakhstan about 3500 BC, but these animals were not ancestors of modern horses.
The team of 162 scientists analyzed the genomes allocated from the remains of 273 horses from all alleged sites of the horse domestication – the Iberian Peninsula, Anatoly, the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the steppes of Central Asia – who lived between 50,000 and 20 years before our era. Researchers compared these genomes with the sequences of modern horses.
It turned out that during the relatively prolonged time of the population of horses in Eurasia was genetically different from each other. However, at the turn of 2000-2200 BC, a sharp change occurred – a genetic profile, previously characteristic only for the lower Volga and Don, began to spread widely beyond the region, in a few centuries, pushing the population of wild horses from Western Europe to Mongolia.
Researchers found that there were two important differences between the genomes of domesticated and wild horses associated with the positive selection of two genes – ZFPM1 and GSDMC. One is responsible for more obedient behavior, the other is for a stronger ridge. In addition, the results of the study show that horses spread through Asia at one time with chariots and indoran languages. At the same time, the migration of representatives of the yama culture, associated with the spread of Indo-European languages, cannot be explained by the domestication of horses.