Through years of excavations and careful analysis of her finds around Krasnyi Yar in Kazakhstan, archaeologist Sandra Olsen has assembled what may be evidence of the earliest known people to have domesticated and ridden horses, a momentous development in human history. In remains of pit houses of the Botai people, who inhabited for mortality patterns that might correlate with expectations regarding domesticated herds or wild victims of hunting.
Herders of domesticated animals used for meat or milk typically kill off all but a few males before they are fully mature, but not the females, and archaeologists have evidence of a similar pattern for prehistoric goat herding. At the Botai sites, however, Olsen has found that most of the male horses if the Botai had indeed begun riding, they would likely have kept males alive to ride.
Another clue that at least some of the horses may have been domesticated and that some may have even been ridden is in the fact that their remains include full skeletons, entire vertebral columns, and pelvises. It is unreasonable to suppose that hunters dragged whole 1,000-pound carcasses back to their dwellings. Olsen suggests a relationship to horses beyond that of merely hunting them as a source of meat.
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