Alan K. Outram

TL;DR: Three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 B.C.E. are presented.

TL;DR: In this paper, the economic importance of bone fat to past peoples is discussed and the ethnography of bone marrow and grease extraction is briefly outlined, and a new methodology employs a fracture freshness index (FFI) to study fracture type, and fragmentation is assessed through the separation of fragments into size classes and different bone types.

TL;DR: Analysis of ancient whole-genome sequences from across Inner Asia and Anatolia shows that the Botai people associated with the earliest horse husbandry derived from a hunter-gatherer population deeply diverged from the Yamnaya, and suggests distinct migrations bringing West Eurasian ancestry into South Asia before and after, but not at the time of, YamNaya culture.

TL;DR: Data indicate that Przewalski’s horses are the feral descendants of horses herded at Botai and not truly wild horses, which indicates that a massive genomic turnover underpins the expansion of the horse stock that gave rise to modern domesticates, which coincides with large-scale human population expansions during the Early Bronze Age.

TL;DR: This extensive dataset allows us to assess the modern legacy of past equestrian civilizations and finds that two extinct horse lineages existed during early domestication, and the development of modern breeding impacted genetic diversity more dramatically than the previous millennia of human management.