Russia is the birthplace of horses
Domestic horses came out of the steppes between the Volga and the Don
Kirill Stasevich, Science and Life (nkj.ru )
Many thousands of years ago, people kept herds of horses just for their meat. But at some point these ancient pastoralists discovered that among the wild "meat" horses there are those who will be calmer than all the others, that they can be trained and that they have a stronger back. Such horses began to be bred, and people had a domestic horse on which they could ride, carry loads, fight (and from which, by the way, they could take milk — it is unlikely that the former wild restless mares so easily allowed themselves to be milked).
But where exactly and when exactly did the first domestic horses appear? It is believed that they spread from the Eurasian steppes. But the Eurasian steppes are a huge territory that stretches from Eastern Europe almost to the Pacific Ocean, it includes the Black Sea steppes, the Kazakh steppe, and the Mongol-Manchurian steppe. According to one hypothesis, domestic horses came out about 5,500 thousand years ago from the territory that now belongs to Kazakhstan and where people of the so-called Botai culture lived: according to some data, horses were not only eaten there, but also ridden on them, as evidenced by the characteristic erasures on the teeth left over from the bit. However, a few years ago, genetic analysis showed that the horses of the Botai people have little to do with domestic horses, but they are close to Przewalski's horses. So Przewalski's horses turned from wild to feral.
The time and place of the appearance of domestic horses can be determined by comparing DNA from horse remains of different ages found in different places. This is exactly what researchers from Paul Sabatier University, Altai State University, Moscow State University and a number of other scientific centers in France, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, the UK and other countries have done. They had at their disposal the bones of horses aged from 10 to 2 thousand years, discovered at archaeological excavations throughout the Eurasian steppe. 300 horse genomes were read from these bones. In an article in Nature (Librado et al., The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes) it is said that horses that lived with humans 4,200 years ago and earlier were genetically very diverse. But then the variety of horses plummets, as if people preferred to deal only with a certain variety of horses - a clear sign of artificial selection.
Already about 4000 years ago, this species dominated a huge area from central Anatolia to the territory that we now call Central Russia. About 3000 years ago, horses became about the same for all people in Eurasia. Of course, they were of different colors, specialized breeds probably appeared among them, but, from the point of view of genetics, they were still much more homogeneous than the horses that people had eaten before.
Among other genetic features, domesticated horses had two notable features: all of them had the ZFPM1 and GSDMC genes that looked the same and at the same time differed from the same genes in wild horses. (Recall that any gene has several variants, or alleles that perform the same job, but function differently.) The ZFPM1 gene affects behavior, anxiety and aggressiveness, the development of the back depends on the GSDMC gene. Obviously, horses with the "home" version of ZFPM1 should behave more calmly, and horses with the "home" version of GSDMC should have a stronger back and not suffer when someone rides them for a long time.
The researchers tried to find out where horses with such variants of ZFPM1 and GSDMC first appeared. In the literal sense, they did not find the very first domestic horses. However, genetic analysis of archaeological finds showed where and when horses lived, which were closest in DNA to those who had "domestic" ZFPM1 and GSDMC. These are places in the south of Russia, the Black Sea and Caspian steppes between the Don and the Volga — horses lived here between 5400 and 4600 years ago, which were the direct ancestors of domestic animals. That is, it was here that people noticed the necessary properties in some horses and managed to separate them from all the others. One bone, which belonged to the ancestors of domestic horses, was found in a mound of the Maykop culture near the village of Aigursky in the Stavropol Territory, other similar remains were found at Repin Farm in the middle reaches of the Don, where people of the Yamnaya culture once lived.
More docile and hardy domestic horses accelerated the development of civilization: people were able to travel long distances, look for new, more favorable territories for life, and it is easier to monitor livestock with the help of horses. At the same time, if we talk about modern horse breeds, they do not come directly to the very first domestic horses: a few years ago we wrote about a study by the staff of the Vienna Veterinary University, who concluded that most modern horses go back to one ancestor who lived about 700 years ago.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru