Domestication of the horse

Researchers poring over genomes of people who lived during the Copper Age have found older cultural contacts between ancient groups than previously known.Threads Needs These Five Missing Features to Be a Twitter KillerThe early contacts—about a millennium earlier than expected—may clarify when technology and cultural exchanges occured between groups in the North Caucasus and the northwestern edge of the Black Sea. The team’s research was published today in Nature.“The surprising finding was that the genetically mixed…

Researchers interrogating the skeletal remains in kurgans—5,000-year-old burial mounds—found evidence that some of the Neolithic people were riding horses.The findings fill in a gap in two fundamental timestamps of humankind’s relationship to horses: the first evidence of horse domestication (around 5,500 years ago) and the first horse-drawn chariots (4,000 years ago). The research is published today in Science Advances.A team of archaeologists and bioanthropologists offer the first scientific analysis of the remains of…