Horses may have been domesticated twice. Only one attempt stuck

Horse power may have revved up about four millennia ago.

Horses were domesticated at least twice, researchers report June 6 in Nature. Genetic data suggest Botai hunter-gatherers in Central Asia may have been the first to domesticate the animals for milk and meat around 5,000 years ago. That attempt didn’t stick. But other people living north of the Caucasian Mountains domesticated horses for transportation about 4,200 years ago, the researchers found.

Those latter horses took the equine world by storm. In just a few centuries, they replaced their wild cousins and became the modern domestic horse.

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