SO HERE’S A SURPRISE.
Up until now, it had been thought that the Botai culture were the first to domesticate horses, and that all domestic horses were descended from this stock. Now, it turns out that not only are modern horses probably not descended from Botai horses, but that Przewalski’s horse probably is. So not only are Przewalski’s horse as “wild” as mustangs, but horse domestication probably happened twice.
That Przewalski’s horse is feral is certainly a surprise, the finding that Botai culture horses aren’t the ancestor to modern domestic horses really isn’t. The domestication and spread of the horse is securely linked, archaeologically and linguistically, with the cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe (on the other side of the Urals from the Botai culture). In the late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, these cultures developed a highly mobile pastoralist lifestyle based on horses and a marvelous new invention called the wheel (or, in their language, *kwekwlo-, which literally means something like turn-turn, and from which the English wheel descends). They then migrated out of the steppe into Europe, Anatolia, and Central Asia, bringing with them horses, wheels, metallurgy, and their early Indo-European languages, which would give rise to Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Albanian, Armenian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, and Anatolian languages.
The Botai culture was contemporaneous with the earliest Pontic-Caspian horse tamers, but they didn’t seem to be part of the spread of horses throughout the Old World. These new findings actually make a lot of sense; the Botai culture was an entirely separate thing, and our horses all descend from the Pontic-Caspian horses. Perhaps Przewalski’s horse originated when the Botai people switched to using Pontic-Caspian horses and let their horse herds go free, or perhaps the Botai people were conquered, absorbed, or destroyed by Pontic-Caspian invaders, leaving their horse herds to go feral.
The Botai culture may have left another legacy besides Przewalski’s horse. Uralic is a language family whose proto-language was spoken by hunter-gatherers living in the taiga just north of the Eurasian steppes in the vicinity of (fittingly) the Ural mountains. Linguists have tried and failed to firmly establish that the Uralic languages are genetically related to Indo-European languages, but it is clear that proto-Uralic peoples and proto-Indo-Europeans (the Pontic-Caspian peoples) were in close contact, due to Indo-European loanwords into Uralic.
However, many Uralic languages have a cognate word for horse that isn’t Indo-European. It probably isn’t a native Uralic word, since horses weren’t native to the taiga that proto-Uralic speakers called home. It may be that that word was a loan from whatever language(s) the Botai culture spoke.
By “many Uralic languages”, you probably mean the Ugric languages: Hungarian, Mansi and Khanty (all the other languages either use clear Indo-European or Turkic loanwords, or have an etymologially unclear word with no cognates meaning ‘horse’ in any other language). A few of these words for ‘horse’ are ló (Hungarian), /luw/ (Mansi, northern), /lɑw/ (Khanty, Northern).
Geographically this is promising, but the chronological match is poor. The Botai culture was around 5000+ years
ago, the split of the Ugric languages from their relatives is usually approximated to be more like
3500 years ago. By this time the main parts of the steppe were already full of Indo-Iranians, and also the Tocharians were hanging out somewhere around Xinjiang. Also while both of these IE-speaking groups had the usual IE word for ‘horse’ (Indo-Iranian *aćwa, Tocharian *yɨkwe) — the Tocharian words for ‘animal’ are lu (Tocharian A), luwo (Tocharian B), which comes suspiciously close to the Ugric, close enough that this already makes a better etymology than speculating with derivation from a completely unknown languages such as that of the Botai.We also know from history that the Hungarians were still steppe nomads up to about 1000 years ago. As for Mansi and Khanty, they are today spoken in southwestern Siberia, but e.g. oral history, mythology and a few other items of horse vocabulary shared with Hungarian (’saddle’, ‘stallion’, ‘horsehair’ etc.) suggests that they were introduced there by one or more nomadic groups, who probably assimilated into the indigenous population but left them their languages. Also, Uralic languages moreover tend to replace the names of “important animals” (prey such as elk, wild reindeer; predators such as wolf, bear) with euphemisms. So what’s the animal par excellence for horse-riding steppe nomads? Going to be the horse, I would wager. If former Uralian hunter-gatherers switching to the steppe lifestyle are going to taboo the name of one animal, the horse is probably it.
Ancient DNA upends the horse family tree
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