Two key gene variants may have made early domesticated horses more tame and more physically resilient to bearing a rider, researchers report August 28 in Science. The resulting horses were among the most significant advances in Bronze Age biotechnology.
Ancient horse DNA suggests modern domesticated horses originated in southwestern Russia more than 4,200 years ago, Ludovic Orlando and his colleagues reported in 2021. While this revealed the where and when for the domestication of horses, says Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, there were still unanswered questions about precisely what horse genes changed in those early populations.