Where was the horse domesticated? This is a very important question in history and lot of politics is connected to it. The place where the horse was domesticated has an effect on the Indo-European homeland. A while back Saudi Arabian officials claimed that horse was domesticated there around 9000 years back and as proof of this, they displayed a sculpture of a horse with a birdle. Now this added new questions to the Aryan theory which I covered in a blog post. Now there is a new paper which claims that horse was domesticated not in Saudi Arabia, but in the the western part of the Eurasian Steppe.
Shards of pottery with traces of mare’s milk, mass gravesites for horses, and drawings of horses with plows and chariots: These are some of the signs left by ancient people hinting at the importance of horses to their lives. But putting a place and date on the domestication of horses has been a challenge for archaeologists. Now, a team of geneticists studying modern breeds of the animal has assembled an evolutionary picture of its storied past. Horses, the scientists conclude, were first domesticated 6000 years ago in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe, modern-day Ukraine and West Kazakhstan. And as the animals were domesticated, they were regularly interbred with wild horses, the researchers say. [Whence the Domestic Horse?]
If you are interested in the history of horses in India, this would be a good starting point.
