Botai Culture: Early Horse Use on the Kazakh Steppe

The Botai culture flourished on the open steppe of northern Kazakhstan between about 3700 and 3100 BC, and it has become central to one of archaeology’s biggest questions: when and where people first domesticated the horse. Its settlements contain hundreds of thousands of horse bones, together with chemical traces that suggest horse milking. Yet ancient DNA has shown that the Botai horses were not the ancestors of today’s domestic horses, which turned a once-simple story into a far more interesting one.

The steppe and its people

The Botai culture is named after its type site, a large settlement near the Iman-Burluk River in what is now the North Kazakhstan Region. It belongs to the Eneolithic, or Copper Age, although copper objects are very rare in Botai deposits and most tools were made of stone and bone. Related sites include Krasnyi Yar and Vasilkovka, also in northern Kazakhstan.

The Kazakhstani archaeologist Victor Zaibert began excavating Botai in 1980 and worked there for decades. His teams uncovered the remains of more than 150 semi-subterranean pit houses, dug into the ground and roofed with timber, earth and probably hides. Houses were clustered closely together, and the settlement appears to have been occupied over a long period.

The Botai people were not farmers. There is little evidence of cereal crops, and they kept few or no cattle, sheep or goats. Instead, their whole economy turned on one animal.

A culture built on horses

The animal bones from Botai are extraordinary. Excavations have recovered hundreds of thousands of bone fragments, and the overwhelming majority, well over 90 per cent at the main site, come from horses. Few other prehistoric settlements anywhere are so dominated by a single species.

Horses provided meat, marrow and fat, while their hides, sinew and bones supplied clothing, cords and tools. Bone tools known as thong-smoothers, probably used to work rawhide straps, are common finds. Some horse skulls and other remains were placed in pits in ways that suggest ritual deposits.

Life on the steppe was shaped by long, cold winters and short summers. Horses are well suited to such conditions, because they can dig through snow to reach grass, whereas cattle and sheep need fodder or shelter. This may help explain why the Botai economy focused so heavily on horses rather than on the farm animals used by communities further west.

The key question is how the Botai obtained so many horses. Some researchers, notably the archaeozoologist Marsha Levine, argued that the bones came from wild horses hunted on foot, perhaps driven into traps. Others argued that such large-scale, reliable horse use implied herding and even riding.

Evidence for harnessing and milking

In 2009 a team led by Alan Outram of the University of Exeter, with Sandra Olsen and others, published three separate lines of evidence in the journal Science. Together they made the strongest case for early horse management at Botai.

First, measurements of horse leg bones (metacarpals) showed that Botai horses were more slender than wild horses from earlier Palaeolithic sites and closer in shape to later domestic horses. Second, some lower premolar teeth showed wear and bone changes that the team linked to a bit or similar mouthpiece, suggesting bridled horses. Earlier work by David Anthony and Dorcas Brown had also argued for bit wear on Botai teeth.

Third, chemical residues in Botai pots contained animal fats whose hydrogen isotope values matched horse milk fats rather than carcass fats. Because mares only give milk when handled closely, this pointed to animals kept under human control. Soil studies at Krasnyi Yar also identified areas rich in nitrogen and phosphorus that may mark dung-filled corrals.

Ancient DNA changes the story

The picture shifted dramatically in 2018. A team led by Ludovic Orlando sequenced ancient genomes from Botai horses and published the results in Science. They found that Botai horses were not ancestral to the modern domestic horse. Instead, they were the ancestors of Przewalski’s horse, the stocky horse of the Mongolian steppe that had long been described as the last truly wild horse.

This meant two things. Przewalski’s horses appear to be the feral descendants of horses linked to Botai, not an untouched wild population. And whatever domestication occurred at Botai, it did not produce the horses that later spread across the world.

A further study in 2021, led by Pablo Librado and Orlando and published in Nature, traced the modern domestic horse lineage to the western Eurasian steppe around the lower Volga and Don rivers. That lineage expanded rapidly between about 2200 and 2000 BC, together with spoke-wheeled chariots, and replaced nearly all other horse populations within a few centuries.

The debate continues

Not everyone accepts that Botai horses were domesticated at all. In 2021 William Taylor and Christina Barrón-Ortiz argued that the dental damage attributed to bits can also appear in wild horses and is not conclusive proof of bridling. Others counter that the milk residues and corral evidence still point to some form of management.

A widely discussed middle position is that the Botai people practised an early and perhaps short-lived form of horse husbandry, keeping and milking animals that remained close to their wild relatives. Their herds may later have gone feral, giving rise to the Przewalski’s horse population.

Human genetics has added a further twist. A 2018 study of ancient human genomes found that the Botai people were not descended from the Yamnaya culture herders of the western steppe, who later spread across Europe and Central Asia. Botai individuals instead had ancestry related to older hunter-gatherer populations of northern Eurasia.

Myths and facts

A popular claim, repeated in many books before 2018, is that the Botai people were the first to tame and ride the horses that later carried warriors and traders across Eurasia. The genetic evidence shows this is not correct, because modern domestic horses come from a different steppe population.

Another common assumption is that horse riding began at Botai. Riding cannot be ruled out, but the evidence remains indirect and disputed. Secure evidence for widespread riding and for horse-drawn chariots comes from later periods, after about 2000 BC, alongside developments such as the invention of the wheel and spoke-wheeled vehicles.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 3700 BC: Botai-culture settlements appear on the northern Kazakh steppe.
• c. 3700–3100 BC: Botai and related sites such as Krasnyi Yar are occupied; horses dominate the diet.
• c. 3100 BC: Botai culture comes to an end, giving way to later Copper and Bronze Age groups.
• 1980: Victor Zaibert begins excavations at the Botai settlement.
• 2009: Outram and colleagues publish evidence for horse milking and possible harnessing.
• 2018: Ancient DNA shows Botai horses were ancestors of Przewalski’s horses.
• 2021: Modern domestic horses are traced to the western steppe and an expansion around 2200 BC.

Why it matters

Botai shows how people on the open steppe built a whole way of life around the horse more than 5,000 years ago, and how new methods can overturn established ideas. Like the domestication of the donkey and other animals, horse domestication now looks less like a single event and more like a series of experiments, some of which succeeded and spread while others faded away.