London A genetic study of horses across Eastern Europe and Central Asia has traced the domestication of one of man's most powerful animal allies to wide-open grasslands shared by Ukraine, south-west Russia and Kazakhstan, researchers said this week.
Researchers generally date domestication to about 6,000 years ago, but genetic evidence taken from modern-day horses has suggested a wide variety of ancestors, raising the possibility horses were tamed independently in several different places.
The University of Cambridge's Vera Warmuth said she and her colleagues used a combination of genetics and maths to narrow down the origin of horse domestication to the "western Eurasian steppe" — an area now shared by Kazhakstan, south-west Russia and Ukraine.
Hair samples
The research followed 16 years of collecting hair samples from more than 300 horses in Russia, China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Lithuania, areas where horses were first to be domesticated. Researchers took hair samples from "local village-type horses," whose genetic profiles would be less likely to have been deformed by inbreeding or crossbreeding.
