The horse
Steppe herders tame an animal that will carry armies, languages and trade for five thousand years.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Horses are domesticated on the Eurasian steppe in the fourth millennium BCE, with the Botai culture of Kazakhstan around 3500 BCE showing early management — though genomics later revealed Botai horses are ancestral to Przewalski's horse rather than to modern domestic ones, so the decisive domestication happened elsewhere and slightly later. The horse collapses distance: it makes the steppe navigable, and everything from Indo-European expansion to Mongol conquest depends on it.