From a 2017 reconstruction shoot of Botai (Kazakhstan) horse riders in the TV documentary: Equus – Story of the Horse (2018-19). Credit: Niobe Thompson, Handful of Films (Vancouver, Canada).
New research on the first domestication of horses has revealed a complex history that goes back 6,000 years.
Horses were being ridden, worked, and traded long before anyone thought it possible.
New research pushes back the accepted timeline of human use of horses by centuries, showing that humans used horses in organised ways as early as the 4th millennium BCE,
Taming and domestication were not single events; they were a slow, stop-start process, full of setbacks, playing out over generations and across vast regions, before full domestication set in shortly before 2000 BCE.
Co-lead author of the research, Professor Volker Heyd, of the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, said: “Horses were already being used in sophisticated, widespread ways before we could pin down full domestication.
“That gap reshapes how we understand human history.
“The role of horses in major historical developments is almost too vast to measure, hence the saying that the world was conquered on horseback.”
Archaeological, osteo-zoological and ancient DNA evidence reveals that three distinct horse populations – DOM1, DOM2, and DOM3 – once ranged from western Siberia to Central Europe. Early taming efforts occurred independently across regions and populations around 3500–3000 BCE, if not centuries earlier. Shortly before 3000 BCE, Yamnaya people were already riding DOM2 horses and bringing these into the western regions. However, only horses from the DOM2 population were fully domesticated between 2200 and 2100 BCE. These horses, spread by mobile human groups, rapidly expanded across Eurasia and into the Middle East, becoming the ancestors of all modern domestic horses. Credit: Jani Närhi.
Conflict and expansion
From the sweeping movements of Eurasian nomadic groups such as the Huns, Avars, Magyars, and the Mongol Empire, to their decisive use in warfare (well into World Wars I and II), horses have been central to human conflict and expansion.
They also accompanied conquistadors over the Atlantic to the Americas and served as the primary means of transport across much of the world until the rise of industrialisation and motorisation.
Today, truly wild horses no longer exist.
Even Przewalski’s horse, long held up as a living relic of the wild, is now known to descend from early domesticated populations, showing how deeply humans have shaped horse populations over time.
The timing matters. Around 3,500 to 3,000 BCE, steppe populations began pushing east and west across Eurasia.
They brought the wheel with them. Cattle pulled the first wagons. Horses came at the same time.
A rider could cover ground in hours that a wagon took days to cross, but both were key innovations in mobility and transport, revolutionizing human society.
Researchers now link that leap in mobility to the spread of Proto-Indo-European languages.
The horse carried people. And with them, words. The languages spoken across much of Europe and Asia today trace back to those early riders and wagon drivers.
Heyd said: “Today, horses are a source of attraction, companionship, and friendship for many people.
“Therefore, it is important to learn about the earliest stages of human–horse relationships and how this unique partnership first emerged.”
The research is published in Science Advances.
