Origin of horse domestication

[Temüjin]

www.news24.com/SciTech/News/DNA-answers-horse-domestication-origin-20120507

"A genetic study of horses across Eastern Europe and Central Asia has traced the domestication of one of man's most powerful animal allies to wide-open grasslands shared by Ukraine, southwest Russia and Kazakhstan, researchers said."

[H. İhsan Erkoç]

That's cool news.

Researchers generally date domestication to about 6 000 years ago, but genetic evidence taken from modern-day horses has suggested a wide variety of ancestors, raising the possibility that horses were tamed independently in several different places.

So perhaps this would end the dispute between militant Pan-Turkists and militant Indo-Europeanists who constantly argued over who domesticated the horse first.

[H. İhsan Erkoç]

Here is another related article talking about the finds of 5,500-years-old Botai Culture in Kazakhstan, taking the dating of the earliest horse domestication a millenium before the one previously known: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090305141627.htm?fb_ref=.T6pUQ3-5CCY.like&fb_source=timeline