Ancient Ritually Sacrificed Stallions Reveal How Humans Changed Horse Genetics

This article originally appeared on Motherboard. 

Some 2,700 years ago, in the Tuva region of southern Siberia, over 200 domestic horses were ritually sacrificed to honor the funeral rites of a high-ranking member of the Scythian people, one of the first cultures known to have mastered mounted warfare. About 400 years later, at the turn of the third century BCE, Scythians ceremonially killed around a dozen stallions and interred them in a sepulchral chamber in Berel, Kazakhstan.

These horses were probably none too thrilled about their fates. But thousands of years later, their literal sacrifice is helping to unravel the mysteries of horse domestication, and its enormous impact on human civilization, as evidenced by new research published Thursday in Science.

An international team led by Ludovic Orlando, a professor of molecular archaeology at the University of Copenhagen and research director at the University of Toulouse AMIS laboratory, conducted whole genome sequencing on 14 exceptionally preserved horse remains from three sites: Two stallions from the Siberian royal mound (known as Arzhan I), 11 more from the Kazakh burial grounds, and a mare that lived alongside the Sintashta people, the first culture known to use chariots, in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, some 4,100 years ago.