Origin of domestic horses

Rasha Aridi

家马是由野马驯化而来的，但是马最早是在何时何地被人类驯化的就没人知道了。最近，科学家终于找到了这个问题的答案。

People have relied on the modern domestic horses to plow fields (犁 地),travel long distances for millennia and so on.Horses have transformed human societies with every step.But scientists have struggled to answer the seemingly simple question of when and where these animals were domesticated.

It took an international team of more than 160 scientists to pinpoint the origin of the modern horse's domestication: between 4,200 and 4,700 years ago near the Volga and Don Rivers in southwestern Russia.The team reported their findings in the journalNature.

The researchers collected samples from 273 ancient horses that once lived across Europe and Asia between 50,000 and 200 BCE.Using DNA sequencing (排序), the team created a genetic map that allowed them to trace the horses' lineage(血统).They found four separate lineages,but the one most closely related to modern domestic horses originated in the Volga-Don region.

Their genetic map also revealed that up until about 2,000 BCE, horse populations across Europe and Asia were genetically diverse.But within just a few centuries thereafter, the level of variation dropped sharply, and all domestic horses could be traced back to the population in the Volga-Don region.

This likely happened when people living in the Volga-Don region began breeding wild horses for domestication and traveled with them to faraway places.Soon enough, this lineage took over Europe and Asia.“As they expanded, they replaced all the previous lineages that were roaming around Eurasia,” says researcher Ludovic Orlando in France.The horse we know today is the winner, the one we see everywhere, and the other types are sort of the losers.

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When and where were wild horses domesticated?

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