The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes
dc.contributor.author | Librado, P | |
dc.contributor.author | Khan, N | |
dc.contributor.author | Fages, A | |
dc.contributor.author | Outram, A | |
dc.contributor.author | Pryor, AJE | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-10-21T09:05:28Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2021-10-20 | |
dc.description.abstract | Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 BC. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia and Anatolia, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 BC driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BC Sintashta culture. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Published online 20 October 2021 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1038/s41586-021-04018-9 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/127531 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | Nature Research | en_GB |
dc.rights | © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. | en_GB |
dc.title | The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2021-10-21T09:05:28Z | |
dc.identifier.issn | 1476-4687 | |
dc.description | This is the final version. Available on open access from Nature Research via the DOI in this record | en_GB |
dc.description | Data availability: All collapsed and paired-end sequence data for samples sequenced in this study are available in compressed fastq format through the European Nucleotide Archive under accession number PRJEB44430, together with rescaled and trimmed bam sequence alignments against both the nuclear and mitochondrial horse reference genomes. Previously published ancient data used in this study are available under accession numbers PRJEB7537, PRJEB10098, PRJEB10854, PRJEB22390 and PRJEB31613, and detailed in Supplementary Table 1. The genomes of ten modern horses, publicly available, were also accessed as indicated in their corresponding original publications57,61,85-87. | en_GB |
dc.description | NOTE: see the published version available via the DOI in this record for the full list of authors | en_GB |
dc.identifier.journal | Nature | en_GB |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | en_GB |
dcterms.dateAccepted | 2021-09-10 | |
exeter.funder | ::European Commission | en_GB |
rioxxterms.version | VoR | en_GB |
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate | 2021-10-20 | |
rioxxterms.type | Journal Article/Review | en_GB |
refterms.dateFCD | 2021-10-20T16:19:21Z | |
refterms.versionFCD | AM | |
refterms.dateFOA | 2021-10-21T09:05:33Z | |
refterms.panel | C | en_GB |
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.