From the BBC:
Saudi officials say archaeologists have begun excavating a site that suggests horses were domesticated 9,000 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula.
The vice-president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities said the discovery at al-Maqar challenged the theory it first took place 5,500 years ago in Central Asia.
Ali al-Ghabban said it also changed what was known about the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period.
A number of artefacts were also found.
They included arrowheads, scrapers, grain grinders, tools for spinning and weaving, and other tools that showed the inhabitants were skilled at handicrafts.
Mr Ghabban said carbon-14 tests on the artefacts, as well as DNA tests on human remains also found there, dated them to about 7,000 BC.
“This discovery will change our knowledge concerning the domestication of horses and the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period,” he told a news conference in Jeddah, according to the Reuters news agency.
“The al-Maqar civilisation is a very advanced civilization of the Neolithic period. This site shows us clearly, the roots of the domestication of horses 9,000 years ago,” he added.
Although humans came into contact with horses about 50,000 years ago, they were originally herded for meat, skins, and possibly for milk.
The first undisputed evidence for their domestication dates back to 2,000 BC, when horses were buried with chariots. By 1,000 BC, domestication had spread through Europe, Asia and North Africa.
However, researchers have found evidence suggesting that the animals were used by the Botai culture in northern Kazakhstan 5,500 years ago.
I don’t know about these findings, but it may be that horses were domesticated at different times. And it just happens that the modern domestic horse is mostly derived from ancient horses that were domesticated in Central Asia. Some mitochondrial DNA studies have suggested multiple and diverse origins for domestic horses. So this is certainly a possibility.
It is possible that these horses were herded in the way that different arctic peoples have herded reindeer. They existed in a kind of semi-domestication.
One of the real problems in studying horse domestication is that the wild horse from which all domestic horses is derived, the tarpan, is extinct. We do have some remains in museums that we might be able to use, but we don’t really have a good idea about the genetics of ancient horses. We do know that the modern domestic horse and the Przewalski’s horses are very close relatives, and despite a chromosome difference, they are fully interfertile.This horse, the tarpan, and the domestic horse are all derived from a single species of horse that lived throughout Eurasia and North America during the Pleistocene. The so-called wild horses of the West are the same species as one of the horses that lived in North America during the Pleistocene– but we still cannot say that horses are native wildlife. People try. I know.
We do know that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in Eurasia ate a lot of horse meat.
It would make sense that this species would have been domesticated earlier than we expected, but it wasn’t domesticated as a draft animal or as something to ride.
Mare’s milk and horse flesh would be reason enough to try to herd these animals.
