Fwd: [Ind-Arch] New evidence for horse domestication in Kazakhstan at c. 3500 B.C.E.

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---------- Forwarded message ----------Francesco Brighenti <frabrigDec 6, 2008 4:13 PM

[ind-Arch] New evidence for horse domestication in Kazakhstan at c. 3500 B.C.E.IndiaArchaeology

 

 

 

 

 

 

(See also the related 2006 article from the Discovery News website

on traces of horse domestication in the archaeological record of the

Botai culture of Kazakhstan at http://tinyurl.com/y2k46v )

 

Francesco

 

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Trail of Mare's Milk Leads To First Tamed Horses

 

Science, Vol. 322, 17 October 2008

 

<< Herds of horses still race across the steppes of Northern

Kazakhstan, and the people in that harsh environment have long

depended on the animals, riding them, eating their meat, and

exploiting their skins for clothes. Indeed, the oldest accepted

evidence for horse domestication -— equine bones and chariots found

together and dated to 2000 B.C.E. -— come from the region. Now,

traces of ancient mares' milk may extend Northern Kazakhstan's

equine roots another 1500 years. Locals today still consume a

fermented drink called koumiss made from mare's milk. Koumiss

tastes " horrible " to her Western palate, confesses chemistry Ph.D.

student Natalie Stear of the University of Bristol in the U.K., but

an ancient version may have yielded some appetizing data: Stear

reported at the meeting that she found the isotopic signature of

mare's milk on 5500-year-old pottery fragments from Kazakhstan. " It

is the smoking gun for horse domestication, since no one would

attempt to milk a wild mare, " says anthropologist Sandra Olsen of

the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

 

Many researchers believe people began domesticating horses about

4000 B.C.E., but finding clear evidence of that has been difficult.

The shards Stear analyzed were made by the Botai, who dwelled in

Central Asia between 3700 and 3100 B.C.E. In the 1990s, Olsen's team

excavated one of their villages, revealing tons of animal bones, 90%

of them equine. Olsen and others digging at Botai sites have

uncovered other suggestive evidence of horse domestication,

including signs of corrals and bit wear marks on horse teeth. But the

bit wear conclusions have been hotly disputed, and some argued that

the Botai primarily hunted wild horses for meat.

 

Stear's attempt to settle the issue evolved out of her work in

Richard Evershed's group at Bristol, which has pioneered the

technique of identifying milk residues on ancient pottery by carbon-

isotope analysis. The varying amounts of such isotopes within lipids

that permeate the vessels can sometimes reveal what species the fat

came from and whether it was from meat or milk. In a paper that

appeared online in Nature in August, for example, Evershed's team

pushed the earliest dairy use back by 2000 years, to about 6050

B.C.E., after detecting milk fats in ancient Turkish pottery shards.

 

Stear used carbon isotopes to confirm the presence of equine fats on

about 50 Botai shards, but the method couldn't distinguish between

lipids from milk or meat. So she tested local horse meat and koumiss

and confirmed a hypothesis posed by Evershed and Alan Outram of the

University of Exeter, U.K.: that horse meat and milk contain

different amounts of the hydrogen isotope deuterium. For reasons

related to the isotope's heavier weight, summer rains in the region

contain much more deuterium than winter precipitation. Because

mares are only milked after they foal in the spring, researchers

theorized that the isotope would be concentrated in milk, whereas

horse meat's deuterium signal would be averaged over the course of

each year.

 

Testing the ancient potsherds, Stear found that five had the

horsemilk deuterium signature. " The way she did it was quite

elegant, " says Oliver Craig, a biomolecular archaeologist at the

University of York. Stear also notes that colleagues have found new

signs of bit use on the Botai horse teeth, giving her greater

confidence that the animals were domesticated. Still, some are

reserving judgment. Marsha Levine of the McDonald Institute for

Archaeological Research in Cambridge, U.K., has argued that the

Botai primarily hunted wild horses, but she accepts that the

deuterium evidence suggests that at least some horses there were

domesticated. Levine cautions, however, that the new technique

must be independently vetted before the Botai horses are

definitively tamed. >>

 

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