Horse domestication (Botai)
▶ Explore on the mapThe Botai culture of northern Kazakhstan, which flourished from about 3700 to 3000 BCE, is the site where the earliest clear evidence for milking horses was found, and it long stood as the candidate for the first domestication of the horse. Excavated from the 1990s, the settlement of Botai consisted of semi-subterranean houses whose floors were packed with horse bones: more than a million have been recovered. People there hunted horses on a vast scale and used every part, making tools from bone, leather tents from hides and a fermented drink from mare's milk, residues of which were identified in pots. They built corrals of posts, and analysis of teeth and bones suggests the herd was managed rather than simply culled. Genetic work published in 2016 argued that Botai horses were the ancestors of the Przewalski's horse rather than of domestic horses generally, which moved the centre of horse domestication elsewhere in the steppe, but the culture remains the best-documented case of a community built around the horse, five thousand years before chariots and cavalry. Horse bones at the site also show injuries consistent with being kicked, a reminder of how close these animals still were to truly wild horses.