Horses were not domesticated in Anatolia

Abstract

Archaeology The domestication of the horse was one of the most consequential innovations in human history and led to profound changes in the economic, political, and social structures of prehistoric Eurasia. However, when, where, and how many times horses were domesticated remains an open question. Anatolia has been proposed as an early center of domestication because of the long history of exploitation of equids there. Using advanced paleogenomic methods, Guimaraes et al. tested this hypothesis on archaeological samples of equids from 14 sites from central Anatolia across a temporal span from about 8000 to 1000 BCE. They determined that the ancient wild horses of the region were never domesticated and identified the introduction of nonlocal and already domesticated horse lineages around 2000 BCE. Sci. Adv. 10.1126/sciadv.abb0030 (2020).