I don't know if any of you noticed the article in Natural History magazine last May (volume 117, number 4), titled "Hoofprints", by Sandra L. Olsen, but it seems they may have narrowed down to one, the choices of locations for the first domestication of horses. Western Asia of course. One of the pages, included in the article, was written by Jay F. Kirkpatrick and Patricia M. Fazio. In northernmost Kazakhstan, are some sites named Botai, Vasilkova, and Krasnyi Yar, which are in the area where some scientists believe the first horses were domesticated a bit more than 5,300 years ago. There were probably subsequent independent domestications of the horse, but this is the oldest that has any proof. The people in these communities ate little, other than horsemeat and mare's milk. Though more than 90% of the animal bones there are from horses, other bones included auroch, dog, moose, red deer and saiga antelope bones are found. What I find difficult to push into my mind is that these animals weren't domesticated just to ride on. They were first domesticated solely as a food item, with the herders first culling the young males to butcher, before they reach an age at which they would begin fighting with other males. The horses these domestics came from were the tarpan. Equus caballus was Linnaeus' name for them, but a more modern name is E. ferus, which could have been a species, or a mixture of species.

This species originated in North America, spreading across Asia and Europe, but then died out in North America, (about 13,000 to 11,000 years ago), and went extinct when the last one died in the winter of 1918/19 in the Ukraine. Though there were a number of horse species in early Asia and Europe, they were best adapted to the cold climates of the Ice Age. When that cold period ended, the horse's range diminished towards the North, and the steppes from Hungary through Kazakhstan. The domesticated stock first came from the tarpans of Kazakh, where they lived off of Artemisia and feathergrass, which they may have dug out from under the snow. European cave paintings show the early horses to have a dun coat, with stripes on the legs and withers. It had an erect mane, with a stocky body and broad head.

In this article, it says the wild herds were tracked, then killed with spears, then butchered. But I've also read (I forget which book) of ancient hunters 1) Driving horses over cliffs, and 2) Running fast game up little canyons (arroyos?) till there is no room left for the prey to get around the hunters and they can be killed. Whichever method was used to kill the animals, it then came time to butcher them. With large prey, such as horses, they were always butchered on the spot (the alternative is to carry them?). I've been unable to find the books I read so many years ago, which mentioned the prime cuts of meat, but I remember the tongue was one of them. The others were not only tender, but also not attached to bones which might have been too heavy to carry. The rest of the meat would be left behind. The preference for horse meat might be hinted at by the dominance of horses in the cave art of Upper Paleolithic Europe. Obviously before the domestication of the horse, this animal appeared in cave art more than any other animal*. As a domesticated food source, the horse would have been preferred in the late autumn, when the horsemeat would be the most nutritious and full of fat. At this time, the meat could be stored frozen outdoors.

Nowadays, these Botai people still eat various meals of prepared horsemeat, and a drink of slightly fermented mare's milk, called koumiss.

Hunter/gatherers never lived in large towns, and the bones they left behind came from a wide variety of animals. These towns in Kazakhstan varied from 44 to 160 houses. A community this size, which relied chiefly on hunted horses, would have hunted out the local horses, requiring the hunters to go further afield than they would have been able to go (if they were to return carrying meat for the whole community). Further evidence of domestication is their finding of what appeared to be corrals in the ancient towns. Add to that the presence of all horse-bones in the refuse from the town, rather than the few bones which would be easy to carry, and it is even more convincing.

* Brothwell and Brothwell. Food In Antiquity (1998) Johns Hopkins University Press