(ORDO NEWS) — European and American anthropologists are discovering the first evidence that representatives of the Black Sea-Caspian Yamnaya culture were the first riders in the world who mastered the art of riding horses at least 4.5-5 thousand years ago, almost immediately after the domestication of horses.
“We discovered that the art of riding horses appeared almost immediately after the domestication of horses in the steppes of Western Eurasia in the fourth millennium BC.
This is supported by a large number of our finds, which were made in the barrows of the Yamnaya culture 4.5-5 thousand years old. . years,” said Volker Heid, professor at the University of Helsinki, quoted by the university’s press service.
According to current estimates of scientists, a man tamed a horse about 4.5-5.5 thousand years ago. At the same time, many researchers suggest that people originally raised horses for meat and milk, and only then began to use them as horses.
Historians believed that their ancestors were tarpans or Przewalski’s horses, but in 2018, geneticists found out that the horses originated from wild Botai horses that lived in northeastern Kazakhstan.
Professor Heid and his colleagues found that the first horse riders were representatives of the so-called Yamnaya culture, whose carriers lived in the steppes of the Black Sea and the Caspian about 7-5 thousand years ago.
Now these ancient people are considered the ancestors of all the currently existing Indo-European peoples inhabiting Europe and Asia, which attracts great scholarly interest in this ancient culture.
The first riders of the world
Such considerations prompted European and American anthropologists to comprehensively study the remains of five representatives of the Yamnaya culture, recently found in burial mounds in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.
All of them lived on Earth about 4.5-5 thousand years ago, in the era of the mass spread of the tribes of this ancient people across Eastern Europe.
When scientists began to analyze the bones of the men buried in these cemeteries, they found that the Yamnaya people they studied suffered a similar set of injuries during their lifetime, including damage to the sacral vertebrae, hip joints and other bones that are often found in modern nomads and professional horse riders.
In addition, scientists have found several traces of potential horse bites on the bones of ancient Eastern Europeans.
This discovery forced scientists to analyze the structure of the bones of another one and a half hundred representatives of the Yamnaya culture, which were found in different regions of Europe over the past few decades.
Subsequent examination of these remains showed that a quarter of them were carriers of the same injuries that were identified in the study of the skeletons of five men from burial mounds in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.
According to Professor Heid and his colleagues, this indicates that the ability to ride horses was widespread among representatives of the Yamnaya culture as early as 4500-5000 years ago.
For this reason, it can be assumed that mankind learned to use horses as a riding and draft animal almost immediately after they were tamed, the researchers concluded.
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