On 2008-08-03 21:53, Rick McCallister wrote:
> Just for curiosity's sake. When did horses arrive in India? My
> understanding is that horses don't do very well in the tropics,
> especially in Africa and Asia due to tropical pathogens. What is the
> most current accepted timeline for the domestication of horses?
Most experts would probably agree on something like 4000 BC, somewhere
in the steppe belt (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, southern Russia). One should
remember that domestication is not a yes-or-no thing: it may be a
gradual process leading from hunting to tghter and tighter control over
animal populations, and its early stages may be hard to detect in
skeletal remains (before the effects of artificial selection
accumulate). It seems that about 3500 BC horse breeding was already very
widerspread -- from Siberia to Central Europe. MtDNA studies show that
there were _lots_ of different matrilinear ancestors of domesticated
horses, while there's far less Y-chromosome variation, so relatively few
stallions were involved. If confirmed, this would suggest that there
were few original domestication events (perhaps just one) but wild mares
continued to be captured in many different places to provide "new blood".
Piotr